For anyone navigating the dark
Partial Eclipse: Gathering the Shadows
“Every now and then I get a little bit restless and I dream of something wild”
When I think about eclipses, I think about Bonnie Tyler, and half-mooned plays of shadow and light falling across the landscape. I think of funny glasses and funny humans, families and friends, and the way an event like the eclipse can take the edge from the dull ache of existence that can sometimes arise in the human heart living at the edges of late stage capitalism. I think about the collectivity of experience, much like pandemic lockdowns eclipsed our lives together, we experience the celestial darkness together too. Like a community ritual.
A human story.
A chorus.
Together.
Total Eclipse: Dark as Night
“There’s nothing I can do, a total eclipse of the heart”
When I think about eclipses I think of heartache, heartbreak, longing and loss. About the eclipse of violence and the darkness of trauma, the way the definitions of these shape shift in the dark, and the way peace and terror both hide at their center.
Mostly, I think about grief.
The way loss is a mythic eclipse. The way its existence darkens our sun. Grief is existentially terrifying, it consumes like fire, leaves us without breath. It is isolating, disorienting, like a liminal and endless purgatory one must traverse to leave the depths of hell. Only none of the exits are marked. It is an isolating and yet universal fall to the knees.
A reach.
A desperate plea.
An attempt to solve the problem of time.
A search for the antidote to regret.
I think too about the way that, at its root, the planet that collapses our light only looks like Grief but it’s true name is
Love.
Emergence: Return
“Every now and then I get a little bit terrified but then I see the look in your eyes”
I think about the griefs I’ve navigated. Death. Health. Divorce. Departure. One after another they line up, repeated eclipses of what I thought I knew. They’ve all covered the light of my heart and the fire of my mind.
They’ve created new stories inside of me.
Shaped me,
like a slow, cold glacier moving over stone. Nothing is the same, but everything is beautiful.
I’ve thought a lot about the stories we tell. Anthropology will do that to you. Tune you in to the stories and the songs of human becoming. Tilt your ear toward the sound of suffering and redemption. Call your gaze to the daunting task that is living. Stories can tell us a lot about who we are, and they can shape what we become. Old stories have value, but only if we allow them to be remade. Nothing stands still. Everything changes.
We can tell new stories.
We can.
What if we all, collectively, in our imagination and hearts, held one another in the darkness? Telling the story of
Connection.
Belonging.
Breathing.
Waiting.
Holding. Holding. Holding.
What if when the light came back we had forgiven one another. What if as the brilliant edges of fire begin to reappear we had forgiven ourselves too. What if we saw ourselves in the bright-eyed view of the humanity we held in the dark?
What if these new stories were a guide, pulling us back from the collective edge we find our selves on. There’s no stopping eclipses of the sun, and there’s no damming grief. Time, as we know it, only moves in one direction. We are alone together on the planet to endure the wild beauty, and the dark terror. In this brief shared journey, even the simplest acts—pausing to watch the sunset, offering kindness. placing our hand on our heart and breathing deep into our body with love—become sacred rituals, anchoring us to the present and to each other, turning everyday moments into the threads that tell the story of our collective resilience.
“Together, we can take it to the end of the line. Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time (All of the time)”
