vol. 4 issue 1
Greetings!
Hello, my friends. Thank you for being here! It is a pleasure to speak with you all again. I am still not back to a regular schedule, and won’t be for at least another month, but behind the scenes, I have been working on an array of publishing/podcasting ventures, including a return to Ensouled. Paid subscriptions are still paused; I will alert you when that changes.
Journey to the Sun show
The solar eclipse has come and gone, but I am only now sharing my personal experience of it because it has taken me this long to metabolize it mentally. I reckon it will take months for its affects to fully play out in my life, perhaps years.
One thing that I can’t shake is how what occurred for me that day, April 8, when I sat in the path of totality, is how frightening it is to think that there are those who deliberately seek to dim the sun. More on that below.
My actual experience of the eclipse went like this:
I piled into my pick-up with my dog, Esther, on the morning of the big event, and drove from where I live on the edge of Appalachia in Kentucky, to a Benedictine monastery retreat center within the southern city limits of Indianapolis, Indiana.
The arrangements for this had been made by a NASA ambassador who lives in my town, an amateur astronomer who led our group of 35 of fellow shadow chasers throughout the totality of the totality.
Part of this package included several pre-trip lectures where our guide gave us information about what to expect and why. He also, weirdly, with no provocation, dimissed astrology numerous times; he didn’t know there was at least one astrologer in the group (me).
I kept mum, however. I am aware that as the vilification of the so-called pseudo sciences goes, astrology is the “gold standard”, to quote Tarnas, and I didn’t feel like I had to be astrology’s advocate, at least not in that situation, because, even though the insults were thoughtless, I appreciated his depth of expertise.
Although there is what appears to be a very strict ranking order in astronomy— lots of scraping and bowing—amateurs can be quite knowledgeable, and so was the case with our guide.
At the site, he set up telescopes for us to use as we wished. He’d also constructed an array of devices that allowed us to see, without looking up, the shape of the sun as it morphed through the occultation.
As the big moment neared, our guide handed out the eclipse glasses NASA had provided and reminded us, again, not to look at the Sun directly.
In the lead up to the day, there had been dire warnings of gridlock traffic, especially around Louisville; I did 90 mph most of the way there. There had been dire warnings of shortages of food and water; I stocked up, but barely touched any of my supplies. There also had been dire warnings of rainy weather; I was so hot from the pre-eclipse, clear blue sky sunshine, I was peeling off my layers of clothes and hiking boots and padding around barefoot in search of shade for Esther and me.
The prediction that did come true was that it would be an unforgettable day.
As the so-called “diamond ring” appeared, Esther began to whimper. She’d grown quieter as the shadows had sharpened, as the light had taken on that metallic quality where red looks gray and white is bizarrely stark, and as the song birds had hushed.
To reassure her, I sat with her on the blanket a friend had spread on the ground. The only sounds were the occasional exclamations of members of the group, and from the incessant grinding hum of one of the nation’s largest flour mills, poorly hidden by a line of long leaf pines between it and the monastery grounds.
As the moon shadow raced toward us from the west, I lost sight of its edge in a cloud bank that had gradually ballooned there over the preceeding half hour. Then, at near half-past three in the afternoon, I saw Jupiter and Venus widely flanking the white-rimmed hole in the black sky where the Sun had just been. Esther leaned into me. I felt a mysterious, sudden urge to cry.
Once the urge had passed, I used my binoculars to view the thick, salmon-colored tendrils of plasmic fire writhing from the edges of the ring. These solar flares didn’t flail. It was more that they whapped at the dark, like dragon tails.
For the four minutes and 28 seconds that the Sun was extinguished, I sat quietly with my dog, the visible planets, and my thoughts.
One thought was, here I had special NASA-endorsed glasses that allowed me to actually view the mechanism by which the light was going out. Before such technology existed, allowing us to look at the Sun and see what was happening without blinding ourselves permanently, how much more terrifying would this phenomenon have seemed?
And, look at how close Jupiter and Venus actually do seem to the Sun! Seeing this oddity brought home how we do, in fact, live in a solar neighborhood, and that these two benefics really are our neighbors, and they do have their own unique relationship with the light of the Sun. At night, when I gaze up to see them, their orbits around the Sun seem only theoretical. Here, it seemed more real; the Sun was temporarily missing, but with the ring it had left behind, I could see the three orbs at once in a crooked line.
Another random thought was, grief is love with nothing to shine upon.
Ah.
Now, I recognized why the urge to cry: it was the physical, primal response to losing, if only temporarily, my connection with the light of all sustenance.
But love? Do I love the Sun in the way love is meant to cherish?
I have thought about this a lot since April 8. Still, I do not have a clear answer about my own bond with the Sun, but I am now aware I have a firm conviction about the Sun’s bond with us. Without it, we would perish.
Why does the Sun do this thing, this gifting of life, for and to, us? I know it is fashionable to assign solar activity to the randomness of things, but to me, that is as frightening as not knowing that the reason the Sun is going out is because the Moon is moving across it, creating a temporary occultation.
A world without meaning is impossible for me to imagine. And meaning to me derives from what matters to the heart. The Sun’s disappearance was touching my heart. I don’t have to know why, I just know that it did.
Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 “cli-fi” novel Ministry for the Future tells what happens when a country goes rogue after a heat wave kills 20 million, and uses technology to dim the Sun in order to avert another such climate crisis, to the horror of other countries, because you know, what could possibly go wrong?
That was fiction.
But not long ago, BBC Radio 4 aired an interview with a panel of physicists and others vetting the mostly pluses of spraying the atmosphere with light reflecting particles, similar to the effect of volcanic eruptions, to evoke a cool down of Earth.
Climate change debates notwithstanding, has no one read their Greek? Does the hubris of Icarus not come to mind?
There is something so pernicious as to even seem evil to me, that we would willingly perform that kind of atmospheric surgery to effect an outcome that has no consideration for the bigger picture of a Solar System that was set in motion long before we were here, and if we don’t screw it up, will certainly succeed us.
It also does not demonstrate the humility that considers we might not be asking the right questions, or examining more closely the real motives of such a scheme. If corporations we currently are asking to cut carbon emissions are slow to act now, why would they act any faster if instead, they could just fund a giant graffiti project?
To me, this is the kind of maniacal thinking that happens when we separate ourselves from Nature, including the Solar System. It’s what happens when we don’t allow ourselves to assign personal meaning to what is pervasive and beautiful, never mind its scientific causation.
More, it’s the outright separation from our good common sense — that which is rooted in so many things we take for granted because it informs our instincts with lightning speed as to what is right and wrong — that leads us to disregard astrology as only a pseudo science instead of appreciating it as sacred astronomy, the progenitor of our current scientism’s version of star mapping.
Anyway, it’s not just rude to disregard the poetry of our lives on Earth, it’s shortsighted.
And most of all, it’s wrong to think we could put out the Sun, and honestly, I think in your heart of hearts, you know that is true.
I don’t take personal offense at those who openly scoff at my world view, which is predicated on the universe being ensouled, alive, and with purpose, but I rue the damage when chauvinism toward the heavens results in too many of us human beings not pondering evidence of how an entire system that is designed to support us might also be a sign of love.
So, do I love the Sun?
I think the bigger question is, what is love?
With this, you can add me to the long line of poets and philosophers who have asked and rendered their version of the answer to that question: it seems to me, love is the impulse to expand and connect. To bond. And it is common to us all.
The platitudes such as “God Is Love” and all that sort of sly phrasing that subjugates love into not much more than a manipulation to avoid thinking too hard about things that at first don’t make much sense; well, I find them useless. At best, they are half truths.
But I do hold love, whatever it is, sacred. And by that, I mean, worthy of reverence for what can give — and take — that no other entity, animate or otherwise, can.
Which is probably why when I think of skeptics who hold the Sun and all our planetary neighbors in their sites as worthy of regarding, but not worthy of respecting for their capacity to exist in an ensouled, that is to say, loving way, I get uncomfortable. Nervous, even.
Was it a love for the light of the Sun, and the terror of losing it, that sparked the impulse among curious observers that over generations resulted in the invention of telescopes, and even NASA glasses?
Or, was it prurience? Is it a sort of objectification of celestial bodies, similar to how a voyeur holds power over his victims and satisfies his sick needs through devices such as lenses and mirrors rather than through direct interaction, through meaningful relationships?
The most memorable visual I have of that day, April 8, in Indianapolis, is of seeing the pink edges of a 360 degree dawn. That was because there was no horizon; primary motion was not the driving force of the cycle of light and dark, obscuration was. And so, no matter where you looked, after disappearing, the Sun was now “rising”.
It was for me, the most vivid reminder that the Sun going out is profound. That, as the ancients warned, there are great endings — but also beginnings — afoot.
I don’t know if I love the Sun, but the eclipse has brought to my attention that I have a personal relationship with it and led me to consider that respect for the Sun can come from more than terror, as was true in ancient days. It can also come from appreciation and even affection.
There is something perverse, even anti-love, about seeking to subjugate and separate everything in Nature from ourselves rather than to seek how we are supported, bonded, and connected.
I love that I experienced that.
See you all again soon!
Peace,
Whitney
Video credit: NASA Earth Observatory