There were merely too many clouds for this eclipse to register as the transcendent experience of a lifetime. For those of us taught as children to look to the heavens for the source of our being, granted by an old man with a long beard and a bad temper, a solar eclipse carries with it the weight of antiquity and mystery.
The tilt of earth governs the seasons, the obliquity of the ecliptic bringing us by turns closer and farther from our star, the sun. These are the celestial particulars, but here on the ground, many of us turn to the dirt to tell us where we are in the great spinning of the heavens.
The entrenched narrative that we have always been a hostile, aggressive people committing terrorist acts against one another is fondly recounted by a culture that can’t see any other perspective … we might consider another story about the advent of writing, one that perhaps a woman is telling.
I like to imagine the books whispering their secrets to their neighbors at night when everyone else has left, creating a special alchemy that people can feel in the room when they come back the next day. Gathering all these portals to unique worlds in one place is powerful magic.