The
eclipse will be available for viewing around 11:30 tomorrow morning in my area, give or
take 15 minutes on either side of this time. I had a picture in my mind of
sitting outside and just experiencing it; the Moon coming between the Earth and
the Sun. Just my sitting there and waiting for the sensations of being in the
day and having the light dimmed.
Will
the birds stop singing? Will all of us and the plants and the trees and the
animals be disoriented for a time? Will the dogs bark … cats hide? Will there
be a sense of peace or chaos?
Then
I read details from the Navaho Nation, the Hindus, and the Yaqui. They honor
this as a sacred event. “Do nothing,” they say, “during the passage of this
time. Be inside. Do not look at the phenomena out of respect of their coming relationship.”
Almost as if it’s an intimate connection between our three solar objects.
Our
Earth is on an oval trajectory, I think, around our Sun. We are held there by a
mysterious pull due to our size, weight, magnetic field of the Sun and of our
own. Around us circles Moon in much the same way. I’m sure scientists have a more
detailed account of cause and effect. The point is, we and our Earth and Moon hang
around this Sun and have been doing so for billions of years or more. Without
that Sun, we wouldn’t be who we are, what we are, and what we are capable of
doing. We, all of us, no matter what skin color or religion or political
leaning, are dependent on this fact of rotation. We have good reason to be sun-worshippers. There is no life as we know it without this Sun and how we circumvent
it.
Another
thought is that the tilt of our axis determines a lot of how our world responds
to this relationship. I used to think the Earth had a metal pin through it just
like the models of Earth in the school library that could be turned to locate continents
and oceans. I would get dizzy and almost sick, when a student played with the
globe and spun it rapidly like a top.
There
is no real pin. There is a center around which we are oriented.
The
entire set-up is dauntingly awesome, and unsettling. I can’t help but feel
ungrounded if I’m not careful.
It
all being a mystery is just not as worthy a phrase as I would like to impart.
I
can only imagine in the earliest years how animals responded to serious darkness
in the middle of the day. Would the First Peoples have been fearful that their
world was finished. I wonder if they ran and hid, bowed deeply in supplication,
or sacrificed someone or anything to appease whomever they believed responsible
for this phenomenon.
This
coming Monday seems as if the current society will be making a party out of it,
well, maybe not everyone, but many. There appears to be a much more sophisticated
attitude toward nature and natural spectacles now. A bit narcissistic in a way,
as if this event was staged as an excuse to get out of town, gather with coffee
and doughnuts, or ‘tokes’ and snacks, or any other manner of refreshments.
Am
I strange that I don’t want to see it? That I want to feel it? Because I can’t
help but consider this eclipse is more like the daily ‘tween-times’ or those precious
moments when light transitions between day and night and night and day. Like a
crack where the magic can get in. I want to sense the strangeness on my skin, the
variation in the quality of the air, the changes in the temperature. I want to believe
that the Sun, being covered by the Moon, is perhaps a metaphor of the Sacred
Feminine offering herself to heal the searing heat of the Masculine with her
caress. Perhaps in these brief moments, these two can be united in the vision
of yin and yang. I want to feel the power of the Moon as she performs her so
infrequent ministrations of being on top of himself the Sun. I want to pretend
I understand the feeling of their grief at having to pull away because each
must move on to perform their singular roles and duties as a brilliant light
and a reflective orb.
And
I want to pray that, if this is a sacrifice, on either of their parts, that it
is for something to come into our world that is good and peaceful and
promising.
