Perspective 2 - Eclipse
Although I understand that every moment is fresh and unique - it is rare that an experience feels truly new, incomparable, and indescribable.
As a painter I have worked with every color and have spent literally years at a time in service to a single color allowing myself to be initiated into its mysteries. So how do you talk about an intimate experience of being a witness to something that has no comparison? How do you describe a color and a condition of light unlike any you have seen? There are experiences that are beyond experience, that may occur for a moment but are on a scale that feels eternal.
We know we live on a rock in space. But do we really know it? How often if ever do we get to actually see it?
I put on my special glasses, suspiciously and with some doubt that a thin piece of film could allow me to stare straight into the sun, and I looked right into her eye. That act alone is incomprehensible, staring at the sun. And then watching as little by little the sun starts to disappear, as the ambient light gets eerie and surreal until after an hour the temperature starts dropping, the winds pick up, the bugs become silent, stars begin to appear, it gets really cold and then, you feel strangely queasy, and all in a glorious timeless instant, the sun is gone, except for a silver (that would be the closest word but totally inaccurate to describe it)a silver halo that can be compared to nothing:electric filmy vibratory living light appears around the sun.
Now you look around and the ambient condition is something that is neither light nor darkness, a glowing darkness, silver black purple gray illumination, unlike any condition I have ever seen yet somehow primal and familiar. And you just burst into tears of gratitude and joy and awe and humility and wonder, sacred holy wonder. It is as if the universe is winking at you. It is an experience that is at once so overwhelmingly intimate and personal and yet completely indifferent and mathematical, mechanical, inevitable. Like having a child. Or existing at all.
Everything is a matter of perspective. And relationship. The movements of bodies through space is predictable, and lawful. But the ability to be a witness, here on this tiny pebble at some distant edge of the universe-to be a witness to the elegant machinery of the universe, that is some crazy kind of blessing. And a call to service, a service to Being, a service to Attention, a service to Wonder.
