Far over the world's rim

In the eclipse portal, a conversation about the heart

Photo by Lucas Pezeta. Courtesy Pexels.

We had a lunar eclipse March 25, and tomorrow afternoon a chute of darkness will hurtle from Texas to northern New England – the solar eclipse’s path of totality. Astrologers call this two-week interlude between the two an “eclipse portal,” and see it as a time of turbulence and intensity. Dear readers, do you feel that intensity? Does the way of the world seem break from its bounds more and more?

Annie Dillard’s existential essay in “Teaching a Stone to Talk” recounts her experience of the total solar eclipse that passed over the Pacific Northwest on February 26, 1979. She describes it an otherworldly, other-timely few minutes, alien from her mind’s constructed expectation of reality. Dillard does not see the moon; instead, she writes, “I saw a circular piece of that sky appear, suddenly detached, blackened, and back-lighted; from nowhere it came and overlapped the sun.”

She continues:

Seeing this black body was like seeing a mushroom cloud. The meaning of the sight overwhelmed its fascination. It obliterated meaning itself… For what is significance? It is significance for people. No people; no significance. This is all I have to tell you.

There’s a gap between what we experience and what we know, and sometimes that gap makes all the knowledge systems we have put in place to navigate the world useless. It’s disorienting. Terrifying.

But sometimes it’s good –