Searching for awe in a leaf or solar eclipse
I had missed the Carly Simon total eclipse of the sun, or at least have no memory of the one in 1972, that she sang about in You’re So Vain.
So, I was determined to bear witness this week — to be able to say when some grandkid asks, yes, I was there, with real details as proof —along with the others who started arriving at Broad Cove beach in ones and twos mid-monday afternoon.
There was a festive air as we sat there in our beach chairs, some of us popping brewskis as if at an outdoor summer concert, others making fun of the eclipse glasses, which resembled the ones we wore at the movie theatre to see Creature from the Black Lagoon in its three-dimensional glory, everyone a little giddy knowing something memorable was near.
We were better off than the ancients and the modern-day conspiracy theorists, who feared that the moon obstructing the sun signaled the end of days.
Empowered with our 21st century science, we still looked skywards, as humans have been doing from the moment they walked upright on some dry savannah.
Our heartbeats still quickened, our senses, as they are meant to do during moments like that, sharpened. I know mine did.
WE WANT TO BE WOWED
We want to be safe, solvent and satisfied in our lives, to spend as many of our days around the people who matter to us.
But we want to be wowed, too. To be able, on our deathbed to say, like Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty in his monologue at the end of Blade Runner, “I’ve seen things, you people wouldn’t believe, Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion ... I’ve watched Cbeams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.”
To know that this thing we call life is special, not just because it is all we have, but because it is capable of inducing that mixture of reverence, wonder and fear that we call awe.
An article in Psychology Today, meant to explain how people felt about the athletic feats of the 2012 Olympic games, said that two things must happen for an event to inspire awe: it must occur on a vast scale and the moment, when it comes, must have a profound effect on us, “forcing us to revise how we view the world.”
Our DNA is therefore encoded to make us gather together to witness natural events like a solar eclipse, according to Rob Fennell, a United Church minister who teaches at the Atlantic School of Theology and thinks that the isolation of the pandemic may have made the natural urge to bond together when an event merits it greater than ever.
Something else made us look heavenward on Monday.
“The sense that there is something bigger than ourselves has always been compelling for human beings,” Fennell said in an interview.
‘CONNECTION TO A CREATOR’
I take his point that when we look at a meteor shower, a sunset, or an eclipse, even children, and instinctively, “wonder what it is all about, what does it mean.”
At moments like that, we don’t have to adhere to a discernible spiritual tradition to “intuit that there is something more” than a “mechanical universe” in which we are just “cogs.” Which is a comforting thought.
That feeling that we are part of something bigger, awe, can be found in so many places. Fennell likes stepping outside, as I do, to look at the night sky, at those distant images of stars, planets, clusters, and nebulae which take so long to reach our human eyes that by then they have morphed into something else or just disappeared altogether.
But he also feels “a connection to a creator” at this time of year, seeing a bud on the end of a tree branch that will instinctively unfurl to become a leaf.
He feels awe looking at an Impressionist painting in which the painter draws in the viewer and “asks them to complete the artistic work.” The amateur musician “goes wow” when he hears the soundscape of a Bach chorale.
THE SINGULARITY OF A THING
For poet and essayist Lorri Nielsen Glenn, awe “is not the thing in and of itself, it’s the practice of slowing down and looking.”
When she stares at a tree, for example, it isn’t just a maple or poplar, it is “this one. Particular. Unique … Unlike all the others.”
It is the same with a person, Glenn told me, a bird, a beach, a forest. What matters is recognizing, appreciating, and honouring “the singularity” of a thing.
That task got easier this week for my Saltwire colleague Aaron Beswick.
When he donned his first pair of glasses, at age 41, he was “mesmerized by the clarity” of what he saw, which had gone “from a VHF recording of the world to high definition.”
Thus, it became easier to note the wonderous in the everyday, which, he said, can be glimpsed when looking down from a mountain top on some luminous vista but also “getting my steps in” while strolling through a stand of quiet Antigonish County woods.
FEELING INSIGNIFICANT AND CONNECTED
Total darkness eluded us on Broad Cove beach. The most we got was a shimmering light that bathed the landscape in a way I don’t think that I had ever seen before.
When I folded up my lawn chair and started walking home, I didn’t feel forever changed, as so many articles I read in the lead-up to the eclipse promised I would.
What I did feel was hard to explain: insignificant on one hand, which is what spending a lot of time staring at a star 150 million kilometres from the Earth will do to a person.
But also an undeniable sense of order in the universe.
And a feeling of connection to something. I had just joined millions of people searching for something bigger than all of us. How could I not?