Pausing for reflections on a solar eclipse

I thought about Henry David Thoreau sitting alone in his Walden Pond cabin many decades ago, satisfied in his solitude, saying he wouldn’t walk around the block to see the world blow up.

Perhaps Thoreau might be guilty of exaggerating — I would certainly walk around the block to escape the world blowing up — but you get his point that sometimes the most marvelous realities are close at hand, the laughter of a child or the sight of spring’s first robin or daffodil — or even an eclipse in the sky.

What’s a miracle anyway but life itself in whatever form it makes itself known? Miracles don’t always require nature to suspend its own laws to get our attention; sometimes it only requires us to pay attention to the natural world.

Too often we miss the morning sun bursting through the overhead clouds or the first light of the moon as the sky dims. These are everyday miracles given us freely.

We find ourselves burdened with mindless realities — facts and figures, statistics (the curse of the poetic class), and dull pronouncements of politicians and prognosticators dragging us downward to blunt minds and hollow spirits.

Hundreds of years ago the poet Wordsworth could well have been speaking about us when he wrote:

“The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—

Little we see in Nature that is ours,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune;”

The first cry of a poet or prophet seems to be: Wake up! Wake up to the mysteries of life within and around you. In this

National Poetry Month we should stop, look and listen to life’s everyday miracles.

The first writing I ever tried was a poem in grade school. The words were stilted and often misspelled, but the emotion and excitement of expressing what I felt was clear. It was the beginning of a long journey of wrestling with words and feelings and seldom winning the match.

I was going to be skeptical, even sarcastic when watching so many people with strange glasses looking up to an eclipse. It seemed a great deal of hype for such a brief look

But then it struck me that each of us needs a moment or two of being amazed. That we were doing so together at the same time was nothing short of a miracle itself. Usually we are gazing down at our cellphones, too busy to look elsewhere.

The words of the poet Mary Oliver struck me as a poetic remedy for our plight: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”

As the moon covered most of the sun and created darkness in the early afternoon, as Robert Frost wrote: “I am one acquainted with the night,” and if you are honest with yourself so are you.

But I was not left with the night but the ring of light surrounding the sun, brighter than the morning peering through my window slats and more comforting than all the darkness of the world.

The lyrics of Leonard Cohen ring express a daily miracle:

“There’s a crack, a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.” Turn toward the light. Be grateful. Share the miracle.