Photos by L. Weikel
Total Lunar Eclipse
I don’t have anything to say about tonight’s astronomical event that hasn’t been said a million times over.
Standing outside in the single digit air, wind whipping through the bare boughs of the ash, black walnut, and maple trees, I’m startled by the cracking emanating from some of them. I’m grateful that we only had to endure tons of rain the past few days, otherwise the weight of what would have been snow would almost certainly be snapping those boughs instead of stressing them to their crackling brink.
The wind is whipping, though. My wind chimes clatter and clang themselves into a frenzy. My fingers numb up within moments.
Being a fan of Mother Nature and always game to either stay up really late or get up at the crack of dawn (preferring the staying up late than the getting up early, if I’m honest) to snag a first-hand experience, I never fail to feel a connection back millennia, to ancestors who were equally (if not vastly more) fascinated by the machinations of our celestial neighbors. Honestly, I almost literally feel those generations rippling back through the soles of my feet, all of us standing rooted to the Earth, staring wide-eyed into the vastness above.
I doubt it took them very long to figure out that their world was not coming to an end when the moon turned blood red, for it’s not all that rare of an occurrence. Especially when there was no tv and the entertainment was the stars, planets, and constellations.
Total eclipses are rare enough to be remarkable, though. For instance, I’m pretty sure tonight’s is the only such eclipse in 2019, at least visible to North America. But what did they think when they occurred? More interesting to me, what did they feel? A connection backward in time? Forward? Could they feel me reaching back to them from now?
It’s undeniable that there is something profoundly primal and humbling about witnessing tonight’s lunar hide-n-seek in Earth’s shadow. We are but specks in the grand scheme our galaxy, the Milky Way.
And when you realize that we know there are billions of galaxies in our universe…
**Poof**
Mind. Blown.
