After the Eclipse

Perhaps an asterisk now that I'm 80

The darkness descending is like an eclipse. The light struggles to shine through the density of the blackness at the core, through the ICE and the cruelty, through the greed, the violence and the vulgarity. It appears around the edges like the corona, the Sun’s outermost atmosphere, super-hot and extending millions of kilometers into space. The light at the edges manifests wherever people are speaking out, wherever people are caring for one another. The light at the edges brings warmth in a frigid February. The center is a crater, a moral vacancy, devoid of generative energy and empathy. Only at the perimeter, far from the center of power, will the shining, temporarily occluded by the darkness, stream out and light up the sky of human flourishing.

Photo by Tyler van der Hoeven on Unsplash

I saw this astronomical phenomenon once. I believe it was the annular eclipse visible in Williamstown, Mass. in 1994. It struck me at the time that Williamstown was a rather stuffy, self-important place to become the backdrop for such majesty. But there we were in the street surrounded by pristine 18th century buildings, watching in stupefied silence as the sun was eaten by the moon. The insects stopped buzzing and the birds stopped chirping as if all living things were holding their breath for fear that the light would not return.

Historically, eclipses were associated with an intense and widespread anxiety. People thought of them as bad omens that predicted a coming famine or plague. Eclipses were associated with God’s wrath and caused entire populations to go crazy out of fear of retribution. Notice how little has changed when it comes to conspiracy theories. The feelings of shame and dread arising out of the swamp like a miasma and spreading throughout our culture have infected everything and are with us now even as they were in medieval times. Somewhere along the line, our perception of interbeing lost its way. Instead of understanding the pulsing unity of all things, the raindrop embedded in the rose, the past resting in the present moment, there is now an overarching sense of malign influence. There’s no escaping the kleptocracy and the wretchedness it engenders. Or so it seems.

I have a range of responses to our shared situation. Some days, I get in touch with the fear. I worry about increased violence in the streets of our cities, cancellation of the coming election and that old stand-by nuclear catastrophe recently revived by the expiration of the START treaty. Some days, I’m aware of a simmering rage that the corporate thieves have stolen my birthright, my air, my water. Some days, a numbness washes over me. I don’t feel a thing. What about you? It’s the silence of the insects and the birds at the peak of the eclipse. It’s the collapse of the glowing solar ball into the sea at sundown in the Caribbean. Somehow I have to remember, we all have to remember, that the moon will complete its transit, the sun will rise high in the sky in the morning, love will do what love does.

This seems to be the great challenge now. To have faith in the promise of children, the impulse of human decency, the splendor of creativity, the gift of beauty in nature. Eclipses come and go. Tyrants and misanthropes come and go. Good people die and babies are born. You can’t force this awareness, this chorus of hellos and goodbyes. You have to just allow it. I want to begin each day in gratitude for the infinite good fortune of living to see such a day even if it’s overcast and I never see the sun. After all, the sun is there all day every day, it’s just that we can’t see it at night or when it’s draped in clouds. There is much that is hidden. Life is filled with jewels like the magnificent diamond ring effect of the eclipse, a brilliant flash of sunlight at the edge of the Moon only visible just before totality begins or ends. I am watching for it, like waiting for a birth or a death. Like waiting for spring.

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