Confronted by the Monolith...

Yes. The solar eclipse (see previous post), was pretty amazing. We lucked out, we sat in long, comfortable, lounger-type chairs, in a sunny, blue-sky sanctuary, with a litle furry critter, surrounded by trees, chattering birds, gorgeous sunshine. Armed with our funny little glasses we could look up and see the progress of the moon across the face of the sun. We were both exhausted for various reasons, my companion was more excited than I about the event, but there was no denying we were both watching an extraordinary happening. Beyond the confines of our sanctuary, the lakefront was alive with all variety of pilgrams, armed with their own glasses, looking up. 

As it all unfolded the birds went silent. There was a hush in the air. At one point it was like that Dylan line: "Darkness at the break of noon..." At the 90 percentile phase, it got sort of suddenly cold. There were eerie shadows alive in the light. Definitely not a normal afternoon.

Just like anything else, probably best to just experience it, not judge or analyse, or god forbid, ask: "Why?"As per that Van Morrison song, "There ain't no why, it just is..." 

Right. There are the explanations, the logistics, the mechanics, the physics, the science; all the rotations and positionings, and etc. Still, I had this sense in the back of my mind, "Shouldn't we all be falling to the ground, in stunned wonder & awe?" You know, sort of like those early ancestors  of ours depicted in Stanely Kubricks' "2001 a Space Oddessey."  (1968), confronted with the inconcievable strangeness of the Monolith? Godsmackingly amazing, confounding, weird, uncommon, otherworldy. I suppose at the least this eclipse reminds us of the ungodly, overwhemling, confounding, inhuman power of Nature & the Universe. We are children of the Universe. We come from "star-stuff" ourselves. So very strange. I chalked it up to another unlikely example of our general human thing: "Don't know Jack-shit."

So, yes, just like many of the other humans, we took in the event, we consumed it moment to moment. Cheap thrills, amazing show. The deeper implications of it all? A yawning, wonderous, head-exploding mystery. We kept our heads together. We experienced it. That's life. Lived experiences. One glorious, mysterious, unexplainable moment at a time.