Welcome to the other side! We all made it through another Total Solar Eclipse. Great job everyone!
Seriously though, how was the eclipse experience for you all? Leading up to it and the reflections after this week’s Total Eclipse, there has been a lot of thoughts and discussions about the Sun, Moon and Earth. The rotations of the Earth and Moon and how we relate to the Sun etc. It all has been so very fascinating. I am going to assume everyone reading this knows about the Eclipse and was able to witness a full or partial version of it or at least hear about it from those who did.
My Uncle lives in Jonesboro, Arkansas and they were in the path of totality. So he invited my family and I to go stay overnight with him and his girlfriend, and we could all watch it together. It is about a 4 1/2 hour drive away from Nashville so we said yes and headed out there on Sunday morning the 7th of April. The drive was easy and we got to spend the afternoon at a small local festival and get a few goodies and watch some amazing tumblers do back handsprings and flips on the streets of Jonesboro. We petted some animals at the petting zoo and ate lunch at a local place while listening to a local musician. We rounded out the night by hanging with my Uncle and his girlfriend and saying hi to my cousin who drove up from Florida to spend the week with his dad for his birthday. His birthday was on 4/8- the day of the actual Eclipse! How cool is that?
The time with family was a very nice reprieve from the hustle and bustle of everyday life. It was nice to slow things down and have a chill morning before we worked our way downtown. We got to climb a tiny winding staircase ladder to the roof of the over 100-year old building to stand and watch the Totality moments with the people that work at the radio station where my Uncle works. We had our Eclipse glasses and started watching the moon slowly scoot in front of the sun about an hour before totality. It was already so cool to see the dark shadow of the perfectly round moon smoothing her way in front of the perfectly round Sun-that is also a Star.
My middle daughter took this on my Iphone using her glasses over the lense
I will never forget the moments leading up to totality and the 2 1/2 minutes we got of totality before we had to put on our glasses again and watch the waning of the Eclipse. Watching the moon keep making her way out of the path of the Sun was also so cool. She just keeps moving. She gave us a moment of total beauty and wonder and awe and she calmly kept going in her orbit. She has a job to do and she just keeps doing it.
(These were the final moments before we had to put our glasses back on).
I read from an Indigenous writer that I follow that in their tradition they are told not to look at the Total Eclipse as it is a private moment between the Sun/Husband and Moon/Wife of our Universe and we need to not disturb them while they commune one with another. I thought that was lovely.
I also just marvel at how incredible Science is. We looked up the moments of totality in our precise location and it said at exactly 1:55 pm for 2 minutes and 34 seconds we would have totality. At 1:54 we were all ready. At 1:55 on the downbeat the moon was exactly in front of the sun and we took off our glasses to a new world! Amazing!
The birds got quiet. No one was driving on the roads. The air temperature dropped significantly. We looked around at a world delved into sunset in the middle of the day. It was an absolute wonder.
(Soaking in the moments. See the bright star to the right? Venus. You can also see the Eclipse Reflected in the middle of the screen).
A few things I won’t forget:
My daughter saying to me right as Totality hit: “mom, look! look now, mom! mom!!!!!”
The cheering of everyone in the whole area when we got to witness this incredible connectivity of nature.
The quiet peace with the occasional exclamation of awe by a bystander.
The smiles on my kids faces.
Right in the middle of Totality, an airplane flew right over the moon/sun.
(Matt took this photo. It’s an airplane crossing over the Eclipse).
After the big moment was over, my Uncle came over to me and said: “You know what I wish I could do? Call Gram.” (His mom, my gram who passed away in 2013)
Moments like this truly make life worth living.
The moon happens to be the exact perfect distance between the earth and the sun that they both appear to be the same size during the eclipse but the sun is 400 times larger than the moon. The order to the universe never ceases to astonish me. Never.
I am at a time in my life that you might call a crossroads. It is not only because I am about to hit a very significant decade number… although that does have a lot to do with the underlying energy I feel lately.
I feel a pulsing. A Shifting. A changing in the things that I want and the avenues I want to take to get toward my goals. I have always been someone who wanted MORE. I just used to believe that someone else was going to give it to me. I was going to be blessed or given the perfect opportunity to just have a beautiful windfall that would include the money and time and motivations that I perfectly needed and wanted. I believed I was going to receive a handout from someone else. Whether a deity or a husband or another human being… it wasn’t super clear in my mind. I don’t even know if I would have known that was the case either.
I have figured out that no one else is going to care as much about my dreams as I do. That’s okay. I care about supporting people I love in their dreams but I don’t have specific ideas for them… I just want them to be happy and do what they love. So I don’t expect other people to have MY specific dreams and goals, but I am now just going for the things that I want. I want to be contributing more financially to my life and our family. I want to get my creative projects out into the world. I want to teach, lead and support others. I want to encourage people to believe in themselves and to connect with other people.
I am in a place where the energy under my feet feels different. I believe in myself. More than I ever have. I believe in the abundance of energy and love available to me. I believe in the transformation that can happen when I allow myself to be changed by my experiences.
“The Earth is changing. I can feel it in the water…” Galadriel from Lord of the Rings
The Eclipse happening in my 40th year on this planet feels very significant to me. I am open to newness in my life in ways that never felt achievable before. Now I feel as if I can achieve things far beyond my wildest dreams. And I am going for it.
Change. Newness. Transformation. Flow. Love. Connection.
I welcome it all.
Sending love to you all out there in the ether,
Stef
I also cannot let a post about this go by without a Twilight: Eclipse reference. So here is the Robert Frost poem from the beginning of Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer.
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Lastly, here is song I love that reminds me that this life is beautiful and we should seek adventure—whatever that means to us.