Tomorrow: Relationships in the Sky

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.