The Eclipse

I travelled to see the eclipse in totality this month. The experience of taking it in through all of the sense is so different than seeing it on a screen. The visual, of course, is spectacular but there is more. The sensation of the temperature dropping, it becoming darker in the middle of the day, the songs of the birds changing from their normal chatter all add to the experience. In the pasture I was sitting in, the cows broke through the fence and the snakes became very active in the pond, moving like lightening to and fro. It seemed as if there was a void of time, 4 minutes of a pause, of possibility, the possibility of shifting something that seemed permanent. The felt sense of reality as we know it, to actually be an illusion, woven in the tapestry of something much bigger than us and what we know. And then the eclipse is complete and we are back in the pasture, trees dotting the landscape, we are breathing the air, listening to the cows moo, back to our own thoughts but yet somehow changed. Changed once again by the power and magnificence of nature.