I have never seen anything like it.
It’s hard to describe… (long pause) but it changed my life forever.
We were at the river. It went dark and all the animals got quiet except for the crickets and frogs.
I’m not a religious person, but that was a religious experience.
We were just a crowd of strangers, until everything went dark and we all gasped, like we were one body. I felt at one with everyone. And that feeling hasn’t left me.
These are some of the once-in-a-lifetime reflections I’ve heard from those friends who traveled to stand in wonder under the path of totality of the April 8 solar eclipse. Total solar eclipses seen from US soil are rare. In the past 150 years, there have been just 15. Only 3 of them have gone across a big swath of the country.
The first was the great transcontinental eclipse of June 1918, which drew a line all the way from Washington state to Florida. Significant eclipses are significantly symbolic; they mark important turning points. 2018 saw the end of World War I and the outbreak of one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, the Spanish flu. Both events changed the world.
The two other total eclipses traversing the US occurred quite recently, in August 2017 and April 2024. The path of totality in the 2017 eclipse went from Oregon to South Carolina. At the time it seemed to me the symbolism was obvious. It was the first year of the Trump presidency and our “united” states were unraveling, beginning their deep plunge into two sharply polarized worlds. The big news story of that total eclipse was how Trump stared without protective glasses at the sun.
The 2024 eclipse traveled all the way from Texas to Maine. If you superimpose its path across the 2017 path, the two lines make a nice big “X.” And for no reason that I can logically say, when I looked at the map, I thought these two eclipses were a meaningful pair, that what the 2017 eclipse cut in half, the 2024 one would zip up.
Often around eclipse times, I sense an unstable, electric quality in the air. But waking up that morning, it felt like a holiday. I vaguely wondered if the post office was delivering mail. I briefly watched the eclipse through a colander in my backyard. But I wasn’t in the path of totality. I saw 100 suns on the pavement, each with a small bite taken out of them.
But then I watched the eclipse on TV for the rest of the day as its totality moved from town to town. Everywhere there was such a sense of joy and celebration. It was overwhelming. I saw the total darkness. I saw the stars come out. I saw speechless people with tears in their eyes, children jumping up and down. I remember one blonde woman saying “I don’t know these people,” she gestured at the crowd, “but they will be in my heart for the rest of my life. We’re all family now.”
The April 8 solar eclipse had brought something impossible since the 2017 one. It had brought unity!
The Medicine of Awe
What cast this amazing spell on such a divided nation? What was the magic? Can we bottle it? As eyes looked up and mouths fell open, the sky slipped a mind-altering chemical into everyone’s brain. It filled us with “awe.” This intoxicating emotion is a natural blend of wonder, mystery and fear that has the power to make small, self-centered thoughts disappear.
Awe induces a high value cognitive shift. Neuroscientists report that awe encourages positive, pro-social behaviors like generosity, compassion, empathy, and inclusiveness. It stimulates curiosity and creativity. It inspires epiphanies. Feeling awe reduces stress, improves health, and promotes greater life satisfaction. Perhaps most importantly, it awakens an awareness of a living, interconnected cosmos, which, also importantly, ignites a desire to take care of it. Awe is Nature’s way of bringing humans into harmony with a wider world.
Profound experiences of awe are transformative. And I know I’m not the only one who felt forever changed by that eclipse experience, even just watching it as I did, rolling throughout the day in my living room on TV. But I always like to look for proof. So ever since then, I’ve had my eyes trained on stories of unity.
And the very next day something extraordinary happened. The Arizona Supreme Court actually ruled that a Civil War era law banning abortion can be enforced; the law was from 1864, when Arizona wasn’t even a state and women not only didn’t vote, they were considered chattel. Yet this ruling wasn’t polarizing. The effect was actually widely unifying! There is not much in this world around which nearly 70% of this country can agree, yet a woman’s right to choose is one of them. The majority is unified.
And another surprising uprising of unity happened, just today, as I write this. The House of Representatives–so divided it’s largely inactive–actually came together in bipartisan fashion and passed a foreign aid bill that had been held up contentiously for months.
I will keep my eyes peeled for more. And I will also keep feeding myself experiences of awe. The total eclipse was just a reminder. Even in these divided times, there is much beauty in this world that can drop our mouths open, gaping with awe.
ooooohhhh Dana—-second time requesting to switch FROM email TO hard copy. Need to know whether this is possible and, if so, can you PayPal invoice me, or how should I pay.
My experience was much like yours. We west coasters are accustomed to watching news develop from the east coast. Loved watching people, many families allowing themselves this pause to fully understand this natural occurrence. Had to keep watching them enthralled, being at one. Twas beautiful!
Delightful. Thank you so much for sharing this.
Awe, indeed. Unity, amazing and I’m still watching also. I enjoyed reading this.