Solar Eclipse
Good morning beloved reader,
I’m supposed to be on hiatus, but I love to play with words and wanted to share.
For me, experiencing totality of the solar eclipse felt as though it activated a sixth sense in human beings — as the event moved across the path of totality from Mexico to Maine, swaths of people experiencing the same natural phenomenon at the same moment in time.
Each moment in time invoking a sense of unity with all who shared the same experience.
A sense that humans beings were 100% PRESENT to the experience.
A sense that each of us experienced the phenomena through our own individual five sense perceptions: eyes, ears, nose, even tongue tasting the air, and skin over body sensing temperature change and breeze brushing over skin; and yet it was also a shared experience — all human bodies experiencing the same event at the same time. Unique and yet also shared.
As though awareness was heightened.
Perhaps a baptism by eclipse.
Not only all the human bodies, but all sentient beings including animals tuning into how the air chilled; the wind eerily brushed over skin as the moon inched in front of the sun — at least from our perspective here on earth; the eerie nature of the light making the shadows look unusual and the wave effect that we saw on the grass after the eclipse, similar to witnessing air waves above a black-tar road heated by the summer sun; the gasps of delight and awe heard all around as we witnessed that diamond ring effect before the moon completely blocked the sun and it looked as though a black hole surrounded by a light hung in the sky.
We were spiritual beings having a human experience, but touching the ineffable through a rare event in nature.
I just finished Michael Pollan’s book on the recent psychedelic research, “How to Change Your Mind,” and one of my key takeaways is that the experience of awe is so good for disintegrating the ego and helping us feel a part of something bigger. And it connects us to each other and to nature. It’s what happens during psychedelic trips and to longtime meditators. There was all that yesterday, drug-free. 😊
I found myself choking up, just like they said I would! Which bothered me to no end, but there you have it. It was a profound experience even here on Long Island, without totality. How is it that two celestial bodies, so different in size, should appear the same to us, that one can cover the other?