Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung, April 11, 2024
The cloud cover where we live in New Braunfels kept the eclipse mostly out of sight, except for a few rare peeks through the fast-moving clouds. Nonetheless, we had the experience that proved the power and force of the celestial order.
I brought out a sleeping bag and placed it on our driveway. Then my wife Sandy and our sweet cat, Ginger, laid on our backs for the better part of an hour and glimpsed through the ether at a white sun slowly overtaken by the black moon. The wind picked up, the temperature dropped, night descended on our neighborhood, all birds stopped their songs, and we were plunged into a cosmic darkness that left us breathless. The cat seemed to take it all in purring stride.
Such is the power of myth. When the sky soon lightened, we gathered up the sleeping bag and went in to watch the moon’s cosmic shadow race northeast at 1500 miles per hour, towards Dallas. It slid up through several states and into Canada. The reports from every news team stationed along its shadowy path was the same: “WOW!”
And something else, something that emanated directly from the feminine moon’s presence eclipsing the masculine sun’s brilliance for a few moments that created a sublime unity within the darkness. The two celestial bodies elicited from many who experienced it a felt sense of unity, of coherence, of a shared species story that we exist on this planet as home. A feeling of homecoming descended on viewers from whatever angle of vision they chose.
Couples along the way proposed marriage and its rousing acceptance; others married, singly or in groups—another joyful outburst of masculine and feminine energies finding one another both before and during the darkness.
The energies unleashed in the eclipse bent towards feelings of wholeness, of a shared narrative felt viscerally; it was not hard to believe that so many felt, even if they did not see, the energy pervading the atmosphere. For a few moments a shared narrative illuminated and conjoined all participants, a new way of seeing through dark glasses, if necessary. The result was a rising tide of coherence, cohesion, and clarity.
Feelings of relationships with others who moments before might have been viewed as strangers were the result of something stirring deep within the inner cosmos of each of us. The eclipse revitalized a narrative of connectivity we had have forgotten amidst the current negativity of divisiveness and squabbling over ideologies and petty elbowing for power.
For a short time, ideologies themselves were blessedly eclipsed by the mythologies of moon conversing with the sun over thousands of miles separating them. As we watched the various locales where the viewing was sublimely clear, we felt moments of what I would describe as reclamation, a return of feminine power and presence through the lunar wisdom of insight. It moderated the more Apollonian brilliance of solar energy. For a moment they too were in communion.
In this historic moment we were all connected by the umbilical cord of time back into history and into prehistory, a time that antedated our own presence in the universe. Such connection offered a resurgence of our shared life story, from beyond antiquity to the present. And well into the future.
Finally, as my wife and I continue to reflect on April 8th. We knew that this event had such a firm mythic foundation, in the sense that myths often point us to ontology, to the nature of being itself. We are called “human beings.” Perhaps during the eclipse, we might have been called “human becomings-in-community.” From now on we will tell our stories of where we were and what we saw, as part of a renewed species story, and how we consolidated with one another in a firm illumination of wholeness.
What a respite it was to be with one another, free of toxic acerbities that divide us, and to celebrate instead our home in what gives us joy.