Totality II
A coda to my take on "totality."
A few days after writing my last post on the total eclipse, I was out on my Adirondack lake in my canoe on a warm-until-the-wind-blew spring day, and the wind suddenly stopped altogether, the lake surface transformed into a giant, blue-black mirror, the bow of my canoe pointed toward the humps of the so-familiar range of mountains to the west, the utter stillness and silence washing over me. I had the following thought: if the wind always blew and only stopped like this once or twice a century, would I be struck with same kind of awe and wonder I felt during the eclipse? Would people gather by the thousands, choking up the highways into these mountains as they had the previous week, to stand on the shoreline or drift along in their boats, letting out a collective sigh at the moment of the event. What would it be called? The Calm? Would people ask each other, “did you see ‘The Calm’; was it 100% where you were?”
This brought me to other thought experiments. What if snow only ever fell one or two times in a thousand years? Would we be left as breathless as we were when moon shadow rushed over us for 4 minutes and the light changed to something rarely seen or felt? Would that suddenly-white-lit world blind our eyes, sunglasses required, purchased by the millions on Amazon?
What if sunrises or sunsets were only astoundingly colorful and radiant with the same frequency as a total eclipse? What if the loon calls and owl hoots I fell asleep to each night that week were equally rare, if the leaves hardly ever turned into a blaze of reds and oranges and yellows in the fall or the light greens and deep reds of the buds now just beginning?
Life is filled with an infinite array of wondrous, powerfully mysterious and haunting experiences when you take a step back and look toward them in the right way. Could the experience of the total eclipse that overwhelmed me a week ago, and overwhelmed Annie Dillard in the early 70s, that total transformation of the known world into something new, alien, dizzyingly reconfiguring, be felt again if I only learned to really look at things?
On a camping trip to Montana many years ago with several fishing/hiking friends, one of whom had briefly worked to become a Catholic priest, we drank good Scotch and sat around a roaring campfire with that big sky filled to the brim with starlight, and I learned about the concept of sacramentality. As I remember it, the concept holds that everything we encounter in the natural world is sacred and holy, even the smallest, most insignificant of things. According to my friend, the God-made world we move through consists entirely of sacraments, holy wonders that can reveal the very nature of God.
I dipped a paddle blade into the lake and felt the canoe glide forward, the wind returned, rippling the surface, and I wondered what if wind rarely came on like this from out of nowhere, just magically there cold against your skin, pushing your light craft along as if by magic. Near shore a loon surfaced and a pair of wood ducks erupted from beneath some overhanging limbs, seeming to run along the surface for a long while before their furious flapping of wings slowly took them skyward. I slid my prescription sunglasses up on my forehead, the surface glare sharp against my aging eyes, the blur of the world potent and blinding, and thought “totality” might be a word better applied to always seeing the totality of the natural world as a thing of poignant, intoxicating beauty.
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Perfect. The totality of nature. The everyday and mundane becoming sacred and rare. I’ve wondered at the dawn chorus with similar mind-games this spring: it is quieter than usual, so I’ve pondered what if the glory days of spring singing are behind us, and the English dawn chorus becomes a rare event? I felt bereft at the thought but immediately wondered if I had paid it enough attention whilst it was there. It’s a salutary lesson to pay attention to it all. Revel in it all. Write it, share it all. As I said, perfect writing and a call to action for me.