Total eclipse of the heart

I don’t understand why I’m crying.

The eclipse is four days and a hundred miles behind me as I work on my computer in a Detroit coffee shop. I’ve got a long to-do list and there’s no time for sniffles. Yet here I sit, eyes welling, scrolling through online descriptions of what happened when the sun disappeared and millions of people simultaneously gasped in wonder.

A few minutes after the moon started its slide across the sun, my daughter and her friend and I spread a blanket at a park in a small Ohio town, popped on our eclipse glasses, and looked up.

I swore, softly and fervently.

Expected or not, the sight of the moon gobbling up the most stable, predictable thing in my universe shocked me. I spent the next half an hour or so exclaiming to anyone in earshot, “This is SO COOL!”

As the moon bit deeper into the sun, I grabbed my camera and wandered our part of the park. At the picnic shelter, several nattily dressed young men traded eclipse glasses and jokes. Children climbed over a wooden train, and a group of slightly drunk adults played a noisy card game. In lawn chairs and patches of grass, people talked, laughed, looked up.

From behind a wall of trees, carnival music and children’s squeals said a party was in full swing to mark the occasion. A woman tossed a toy for her dogs. Nearby, three girls took turns jumping across a small stream.

We looked up and waited.

Time grew quiet as the minutes ticked down to totality. I shivered against the growing coolness as a dimness settled over the trees, an odd dusk with shadows falling at all the wrong angles like a horror movie filter.

The air thickened, silencing whatever little noises usually fill it. The card game had stopped. The children on the train now huddled against their mothers, eyes uncertain.

Thirty seconds. The fingernail that remained of the sun shrunk, shrunk, shrunk, and panic clenched my chest with the sudden certainty that the sun was melting, sucked backward into endless darkness and would never reappear. I had to stop it, but I couldn’t breathe, I could only look up and watch and gasp and gasp and gasp and all around me the air swelled, not with sound but with the pressure of a hundred people, two hundred people, all ready to burst with the silence and the waiting and the melting sun, a dull, throbbing roar of aching longing and then the sliver of gold winked and was gone.

The park erupted. It wasn’t a cheer. It wasn’t a celebration. It was a cry wrenched from our mouths unbidden. As one, we yanked off our paper glasses and gasped and pointed and said words without thinking and gaped at the 360-degree sunset and the black afternoon sky and the hypnotizing, blazing ring, tears in our eyes though we couldn’t have told you why we were crying any more than the birds could tell you why they were suddenly whirling in frenetic loops above our heads.

For nearly four minutes we stood, awestruck, clinging to every second.

And then, oh, glorious then ― just when I couldn’t stand for another moment the thought that this moment had to end ― a flash of whiteness, purer than anything I can imagine, shocking as lightning.

“THERE IT IS!” hollered an exultant voice, and it was my voice, and I once more had tears streaming from my eyes and jubilation streaming from my face as I stole one more look at the sun, the sun, the blessed sun I had no idea I missed so dearly until it came bursting back from out of the darkness.

Around me, other cries, other voices gasping to express that which has no words, other eyes wide and bright as we watched dawn glide down over the trees in pink and yellow and gentle lightness.

I breathed deep and felt the breeze against my cheek. From behind the trees, the sounds of carnival rides started up again, and children giggled and dogs barked. I stretched out stomach-down on the blanket and took close-up photos of the grass.

I read that animals behave strangely during an eclipse. At the San Antonio Zoo on Monday, flamingos snuggled, whooping cranes danced, and meerkats raced in mobs. 

Lots of folks, in pieces I’ve read online, say the eclipse moved them because it made them feel, physically FEEL, a part of the universe. Others sensed, in that irresistible sense of awe, a breathtaking connection to their Creator and the perfection of His creation.

I’d like to have a profound explanation for why I reacted the way I did. Really, though, I think I cried and hollered and melted into the planet a little for the same reason the animals acted weird. Which is to say, I don’t know why it happened. It just happened, and it reset something inside me over which I had no control, something I dearly hope won’t drift slowly away while I’m looking the other direction.

Dozens of metaphors are tugging at my pant leg, begging to be allowed in. This ring, this light, this death and glorious resurrection, this darkness and coming together and blotting out and making new…they are rich with Deeper Meaning just waiting to be given words that make people nod and say, “Ah, yes, now I see.”

But this moment doesn’t get a metaphor. I don’t know why this thing that happened hit me right in the gut and still, even as I type this, makes me drip tears on my keyboard. But it did, and it does, and that’s enough.

Awe, inexplicable and glorious ― all by itself, it’s enough.

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If you would like to tell me your eclipse story, I'd love to read it. Share in the comments, or email me at julie.j.riddle@gmail.com. I'll happily enjoy your photos with you, too, if you'd like.

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My new website remains imperfect, but I still like it. Check it out at juliejriddle.com and let me know what you think.

I hope you find something to bring you awe today.