Touched by Totality

Who are we now?

Pictures courtesy of Ben Pearson at Photography.com

Last Monday, 32 million people in the United States stood or sat or laid themselves down on the ground and waited, waited as the moon slowly inched its way upward across the face of the sun, as the light grew darker, the temperature slowly fell, the birds quieted, the wind picked up and whistled. 

32 million people in fields, on the tops of mountains or the roofs of buildings, in parking lots in cities and small towns from Texas to Maine waiting for a moment identified by the solemn and mysterious phrase, the totality.  Would the experience be as mind altering as predicted?  Would nature have something to say to us when totality occurred, something to offer to alter or advise our way forward as humans on this planet? Or would the event be a big disappointment, hyped by the media for high readership? We were all about to find out. 

A last-minute scramble of plans and a generous invitation found me, the day before the eclipse, in the back seat of a car stuffed with people and blankets and a few hand drums headed four hours north to a cabin in the woods just outside of Houlton. “Houlton: the Eclipse Ends Here” is how the town advertised itself as a prime eclipse watching spot. The city will be the farthest and last city in America to experience the eclipse when it slowly moves diagonally across America. It is also the place where totality will last the longest: 3 minutes and 18 seconds.

The mood in the car is festive, almost giddy. After more guests arrive and we’ve all dragged our stuff out of trunks and into the cabins, fifteen of us gather in a circle before a fire to share our stories and make connection. We don’t all know each other but as serendipitous connections are revealed both around the fire and at dinner that night, you could hear gasps and giggles of delight and surprise.

When we come together again in a circle beside a snow covered field on Monday, we each share our hopes for this experience which is, finally, just minutes away! My hope, I told the group, is to be inspired by the sun’s move into darkness as it is cloaked and stilled by a force beyond itself and to be patient as I wait in the dark for it to return. We are in a dark phase of our existence on this earth, and we will need to learn how to be in that dark, to use its erasure of what is familiar as a time for reevaluating, restructuring: for transformation.

After sharing our hopes, we sing together, the songs led by couple, each with a beautiful voice. Then we drum and shake rattles, the rhythm rising and falling trancelike, as if we are trying to reach the moon and the sun with our sound, to urge them on to their dance in the sky. I find a spot to lie down on a blue tarp, the kind you rake leaves onto or use to cover piles of dirt. Around me on blankets and more tarps is my eclipse community: a 12-year-old boy, men and women in their 30’s and 40’s and a few of us hovering around 80. 

As the moon bites into the sun and the light slowly drains from the sky and darkens the snow-covered fields and the high pines on the horizon, we all fall into silence. As totality gets closer, the color of the light turns a lime-yellow and my friends now look more like pretty fish in a watery world than humans in a field. And as predicted, it gets very cold. I wrap my scarf around my head and put my coat back on. With only a sliver of sun still shining I hold my breath for that moment of totality to occur.

When it happens, finally happens, all I can do is mutter “Oh my God”, “oh my God” over and over.  For it is truly a holy moment of transfixion, of rapture.  It was not a moment of darkness as I had anticipated.  Instead, the corona of light that emanated from the sun even when the sun was fully eclipsed was so bright, so filled with energy, that I could hardly hold still. Oh! Darkness. You are not emptiness, you are not obliteration and death, you are light in another form. Even in the dark, everything is still there, waiting.

Then I heard the music.  High vibrating sounds echoed through my body, transporting me from my blue tarp beside the snow-covered field, from my earthly existence with my cold toes and my embodied self into a place in the center of the atomic universe, somewhere between earth and the moon, between Jupiter and Venus.

It took me several minutes to realize this music was not coming from the universe but from a glass sound bowl deftly played by the young man behind me on the blue tarp. 

“Oh,” I told him, “it’s you and not the universe vibrating!” 

I laughed at my mistake but somehow it didn’t make the experience any less real or any less magical.  For the truth of this moment is that the cosmos is always vibrating and that we are vibrating with it and are but one light-being in the immense universe which has its own beauty, its own language, its own laws and will go on infinitely humming its beauty long after all of us in this circle and all of life as we know it has passed over to the other side.

38 million of us in this fractured country shared this extraordinary moment devoid of political and social divides. Together we witnessed the power, the wonder of the universe and felt it enter our bodies at a cellular level, a level beyond the constriction of language. In a country whose culture and institutions are hell-bent on subduing nature and glorifying mankind we were gifted with this moment in which we got to see both how small we are and how vast and wondrous the world is without us.

May we go forth together in humility and kindness and joy and gentleness.

May we be transformed.