The first time I experienced myself on Earth As a Planet in Motion was looking at the red moon.
I knew that night, in a visceral way, that I was living on a planet which was in perpetual motion turning on it’s own axis somewhere in the cosmos of stars and black space.
I felt the power of the moon and the movement of the Earth beneath my feet.
When the opportunity came for me to go see the eclipse of the sun by the moon I scrambled to get to the Zone of Totality a 70 mile swath across the United States from Oregon to South Carolina. I made it to Torrington, Wyoming not quite the “midline” but within the Zone of Totality - words I have come to love and which are as rare in our human experience as seeing this is. Turns out it happens about every 18 months but is mostly over water as the earth is covered by 75 percent with water. But even once every 18 months, imagine having the experience of being in a Zone of Totality in your life.
It lasted only a little over a minute but the whole process of the moon, fully black to the eyes behind the special solar glasses, the process of getting to totality took about an hour and a half as the black moon nibbled it’s way across the orange sun bit by bit creating various form of yin-yang relationships at one point being the perfect yin-yang design. Half sun. Half moon. Half orange. Half black. Traveling at 1800 miles per hour, I could feel the moon’s dominance and determination. It’s personal strength to consummate its pre-determined destiny. The native Americans centuries ago believed that the sun and the moon were having sex during the solar eclipse. When everyone in the little park in Wyoming where I was watching began applauding at the moment it got silvery dark and the sun was fully covered with the perfect circular moon, there was a felt sense of accomplishment, mutuality, togetherness, perhaps for just as long as it takes to have a mutual orgasm! Not a bad description of being in the Zone of Totality.
Eerily the light around me began to change about half-way through getting clearer and grayer, kind of silvery, the way florescent lighting neutralizes contrast and colors.
The sun was so powerful that nothing much changed until it was almost fully covered. No direct looking at the sun. It held it’s place and force and power until totality when we could take the protective glasses off and look directly at the sun for that one minute, its ability to burn briefly halted with only a small corona visible around the blackness and fulness of the moon.
There wasn’t enough time to get chilly but as the sky went into its dark blue and the sunset oranges and pinks and purples emerged and could be seen from high up in full 360 degrees, the leaves of the trees turned blackish and the shadows of the eclipse danced with the wind in crescent-shaped ballets one could watch on the cement around the picnic table in the park. The patterns and dances changed as the moon moved along reversing the yin-yang imagery of the relationship between the moon and the sun, on its way out of eclipse, out of the intimate relationship just shared.
The sun’s light is so powerful that it took one tiny moment beyond the diamond moment before everything turned back to daytime as we know it.
Watching this miraculous convergence has left a permanent mark on my visual memory and I am grateful for it.