The sky darkens. Bird activity ceases. Not a single leaf quivers in the still air.
The quiet – so quiet it’s loud.
The cloud blanket overhead slips silently across the sky, undulating in thickness.
A gray pallor settles over the neighboring houses, trees across the street, flag hanging limp on the pole – as if we are living a Photoshop image and someone has slid the cursor down the slider bar in the “saturation” setting, moving the landscape into greater monochrome.
I stare at the spot where I last saw the sun, now hidden behind the undulating clouds. A glimpse… then gone. Another glimpse? No. Wait. Here it comes. Just a flicker … is it? Can’t tell. Gone again.
I half-close my eyes and gaze upward through my eyelashes.
There. Clear as can be – the crescent shape of our sun, mostly obscured by its dance partner, our moon.
One… two… three minutes tick by. Cars drive down the nearby road, the drivers oblivious, but all other life has seemed to stand still.
In this moment, entire lifetimes of pattern are – let’s just say it – being eclipsed within my system. An entire matrix of identity is being washed away in the chilly dark silence of this sun-moon-earth alignment. I feel an impulse to weep.
Silence. Stillness. And yet so much in motion. Invisible to the eye, but cataclysmic in the cosmic rhythms that govern existence, mine and yours.
The stillness cleanses. The wave washes through. And then… a flicker of light. Through a gap in the clouds, a ray of brilliance. The old familiar radiance of our sun, coming back online in full glory.
My goodness, it’s bright. Intense. Our entire existence depends upon this blazing ball of gas, spewing photons and pulsing light into the solar system. We’re so vulnerable in our dependencies on this – an orb made entirely of gasses, a violent eruption of nuclear fission, a medium we label as “space” through which the lightwaves pass on their way to warm the blue-green marble we call home.
The number of miracles that must unfold in perfect orchestration, every nanosecond, to create the experience we call “life” is astonishing and mind-boggling.
For one moment today, I stood in a straight line – me, myself, moon, sun, all lined up. The undulating cloud layer slithered overhead like an atmospheric wash cloth, wiping down the countertop of my existence. An old layer: cleansed. A new life: revealed.
A flock of birds flits across my view, intercepting my cosmic alignment straight line. The giant Photoshop “saturation” sliding bar moves upward again, restoring color to the landscape. Leaves flutter, ever so slightly, on the nearby trees. Life has returned into motion.
I wonder how many humans have gazed at an eclipse throughout history? I had the privilege of accessing resources on space.com to see the precise time it would be passing my area, the trajectory it would travel, the percentage of coverage it would reveal here, and countless articles distinguishing “annular” from “total” solar eclipses, the eclipse calendar for coming years, and more context than I ever dreamed possible to understand this phenomenon. Not long ago, humans just observed “it’s darker” and created myths and stories to provide context for our meaning-making hunger. How we make sense of events will continue to evolve, and with a bit of luck, we’ll be around to observe eclipses for a long time yet.
But for just one moment today, I dropped meaning-making and simply stood in a straight line – me, myself, the moon, the sun, and the cellular memory of people long ago, all of us gazing upward in awe as life around us seemed to stand still and the lights went dim on the world around us.
It’s true – the absence of light makes one appreciate the light even more. Today, the sun came back. The birds resumed flight. And I sat down and began anew.