How can a moment so fixed and precisely known produce so much mystery, spontaneity and just pure magic?
A couple of years ago I traveled from Southern California with my physicist husband to just outside of Rigby Idaho to witness the total eclipse of the sun. It had to be totality he told me as we made plans on where to see it which I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. Truth be told, I thought it was a long way to travel and a big expense just for 2 minutes and 19 seconds. I certainly wasn’t seeing the ROI on this adventure.
The night before and the morning of the eclipse a tiny part of my mind spun off and like a fly who’d fallen into a can of beer was buzzing around and fretting about the fixed 2 minutes 19 second window of time. What if I was distracted or worse yet locked in the bathroom and missed the whole darn thing? Where was my ROI then?
Well I was able to squash that drunken fly with my better mind and use the time leading up to the eclipse to take photos of the scene along with experiencing the moment of anticipation with others who’d traveled from both near and far away.
While waiting for the moment of totality I experienced a very noticeable drop in temperature, the emergence of evening smells that traditionally precede a setting sun, saw the sudden burst of the first star and heard an excited young boy yell, “I see a star, I see a star” all while watching mosquitoes fooled into coming out and a goat into lying down for the evening.
The moment before totality the sky was as bright as any day and the tiniest sliver of sun remained and then without a sound, or other perceptible change – totality. Although I cannot decide which was more beautiful, the second before totality when a spark of the sun was left behind or totality when the whole world was transformed, I now understand totality.
I knew it was going to happen, I knew why it was happening, I knew when it was going to happen, but no amount of knowledge could have supplanted the sensory experience. That is the wellhead of mystery and magic. Witnessing that ephemeral moment before, during and after totality: Priceless.
During the pre-eclipse wait I took a picture of an earnest boy gazing at the sun and on a whim uploaded it to Instagram with #nyteclipse. After my totality experience I learned that the moment was picked up by the New York Times and catapulted onto their website and would be included in the print version of the paper the next day. An exciting experience second only to seeing a total eclipse of the sun.
About that ROI, not so easily measured.
But my new motto: Go Total or Go Home.
