Solar Eclipse, in its Glorious Totality

            I was so excited to be seeing a total solar eclipse! I had read Annie Dillard's essay, watched David Baron's Ted Talk. I knew about the shadow bearing down on the landscape, the corona around the eclipsed sun, the sudden appearance of stars and planets and wind, the weird colors never before seen. I was so looking forward to it all.

            I had come with a group of artists and other friends, joining eighty or so people dispersed

on a high bluff in Eastern Oregon, where the desert stretched for forty, fifty miles in all directions, flat and practically treeless. Only a ripple of distant mountains intersected the horizon. 

            "It's starting!" someone cried. I crammed on my eclipse-safe glasses and looked at the sun. 

(Note the color of the grass in these three pictures.)

It was the size of a full moon and yellow-gold, with a tiny piece broken off in the far upper right of the arc, a broken plate.

            I turned around to look at the desert. Far in the distance, the sky was darkening. I felt the urgency of a mother to call her children into the house before the storm hit. But this wasn't a storm. It wasn't ominous dark clouds. It was a darkening of the sky that came towards me, bright sunlight far in the desert on either side.

            I looked at the sun again. It was no longer like a plate with a chip at the edge. The eclipse of the sun wasn't like the reverse of the moon going through its phases. The sun's crescent wasn't like the moon's crescent but thicker. The moon was sliding over the sun not like a bandit stealing treasure nor like an actor stealing the show but like a partner in a dance. The movement was slow and graceful, a solar-lunar pas de deux.

            We are wrong to use "eclipse" to mean depriving someone of significance or power. A solar eclipse is a mutual motion, an elaborately equal collaboration of movement.

            The grasses turned more darkly tawny, but it wasn't a color I hadn't seen before. The air was more chilly, but the wind didn't pick up. On the other side of the bluff, behind the sun, day was as usual. Here was dusk.

            Only the tiniest, most brilliant crescent was showing on the bottom left of the sun, not in parallel to the chip that was missing as the dance began, but much longer and thinner and very, very beautiful, not yellow-gold but gleaming silver.

            Then the moon slid over that last visible part of the sun. From the family next to me came  dramatic cries of, "It's the end of the world!" and "It's Armageddon!" But it wasn't like that, either. The child was voicing what she had been expected to feel.

            Dark night reigned only directly around the corona. A few stars came out. Beyond us, on Earth, day continued as usual. Here was a circle of night in the midst of day. Here, in this mystical, transcendental circle of dark was the spotlighted climax of the celestial ballet: the bright glow of the out-piercing points of the sun behind the dark of the moon. The partner had picked up the ballerina in her arabesque and was holding her aloft, displaying that beauty of line and form, here also of light and dark, as we gazed and gazed, holding our breaths, knowing he couldn't hold her up forever, mesmerized by this beauty for the hours and hours of the 121 seconds of the eclipse totality, the orchestra all the while holding a murmuring trill, the violins playing pizzicato. 

              Tears filled my eyes.

       For one incredible split second, as the moon continued its elegant glide across the face of the sun, I saw a blinding silver crescent of light, all the gathered force of those points of the crown suddenly sucked into that released light. The dance partner was setting the ballerina on the floor – slowly, silently, "with how sad steps o moon." But it wasn't like that, either. It was simply the de-eclipsing of the sun, the denouement of the dance between light and dark created by two glorious celestial bodies who did a turn, kissed, and parted, playing their role in the larger dance of the universe to which we, infinitesimal specks on Earth, were privileged witnesses.