I was struck today by how much interest I suddenly had to experience the rare solar eclipse with my family. There was something sacred about it that I wanted to explore with some writing. It’s not profound but getting it out of my head helps me understand myself more, and helps me to chip away at my confrontation with post-modern life.
I took my kid out of school today to experience today’s rare solar eclipse. We are not in a location of total eclipse, only partial, but for her it’s a thing of curiosity. Unfortunately, the school wasn’t doing much. She was to experience it on live stream in the classroom.
The incredible ability that technology affords us to witness an event like this eclipse online is remarkable. I write here with my suspicion of how technology impacts our lives in a deeply harmful way. I find that when I take a close look at technology in its totality I become more and more uneasy by how shallow and harmful so much of it actually is. But there are occasions when technology offers an unobjectionable and truly helpful answer to our natural human curiosities. The NASA livestream is certainly a gift for so many to witness such a phenomenon.
But there’s something about connecting with our humanness through experiencing something like this without technological barriers. To see it in a more simple way similar to that of civilizations before us. Like so many others, my daughter and I made a quick pinhole viewer out of an old cereal box, white paper, tinfoil, and some tape. The simple building of the basic tool made her more excited than the anticipation of the event on its own.
After dropping her off at school and realizing they would watch the eclipse inside on a live stream, she was pretty disappointed holding her pinhole viewer. So I went and got her about 20 minutes before our local partial-totality hit. We sat in the backyard and had fun, the three of us in our little family.
At first it seems so much more disappointing than the hype. Through our cardboard pinhole viewer we see a small circle of light that doesn’t hold very steady as we breathe. Maybe this was worse than I hoped, I could be watching a crystal clear filtered and beautiful view of it from a NASA telescope on YouTube. But gradually we begin to settle in and there’s a transformation. Our minds become more focused on the light source changing in tiny increments, the change in the natural environment begins to appear more heightened, we hear the birds settle, and witness the light of the sun reduce slightly, and it culminates in us all sharing a gaze with one another over how cool and unique of a moment it is compared to our everydayness.
It becomes a sacred moment where, what Heidegger referred to as the fourfold, came together to shine forth for us. Earth, Sky, Divinity, and Mortal, creating a unity that one can’t help but feel is sacred. It’s the connection to the divinity of the cosmos, the earth that we stand on actually grounding our situation and making the connection matter to us, our mortality highlighting the fact that this is unique because we will eventually die or move on from one another showing these moments are fleeting, and the sky holding aloft the celestial bodies. These things are distinguishing factors in a moment, all coming together to focus us.
What wound up being the centering and orienting force here was the practice of using our own perceptions to experience it together. In my case, this unique moment in the cosmos gathered the scattered family around a $0 used cereal box to experience something safely that all of nature experiences together, gathering for us the universal feeling of an immemorial moment humans have experienced for centuries. A moment that brings into focus some traditional practices of peoples who came before us and who saw events like this as having an orienting power that disclosed worlds to them.
Simplicity is joined with cosmic action and we feel in tune with it, even if it’s brisk. The moment as well as the moment’s history through the centuries as humans have physically experienced it. Something that checks some box inside me that makes me feel these types of experiences are a tiny clue as to what it is meant to be human. To be in this universe, with others, experiencing the things that cannot be manipulated for our benefit.
I fully admit we took advantage of the gift of technology to watch the stream after we had done our manual investigating. It offered incredible views of totality in Mexico and models to demonstrate how the rest of the day will go for certain cities through the country. This knowledge added to the excitement, technology actually contributing to something sacred rather than scattering us away from it. But we went back to the pinhole viewer and enjoyed the visual and slow transition of the moon across the sun, the iPhone screen being just a small bonus. There was nothing like holding the eclipse reflection in our hands to feel the weight of the moment, there, in that place we all shared.
This was my experience today and why it held such value, and what I want to impart on my kid when we are allowed to gather around something special like this. She certainly gets it saying to me “Papa, I really enjoyed that experience with you.” No technological commodity needed, no corporate sponsor, only observation and curiosity that gathers us as people. Sprinkle in some connection, and the recipe is something to help better our challenged post-modern lives. Whether it’s gathering around something as unique as an eclipse, having special time in special places, or perhaps just simply gathering around the dinner table with the people we love, these moments of focus truly shine down on us and connect us with who we are. I’ve certainly become a tad mystical as I’ve aged and connected with great thinkers of the modern age. I can’t shake it—nor do I want to.