The sun was going, and the world was wrong.—Annie Dillard
When I witnessed my first solar eclipse in April 2024, it was exactly as Annie Dillard described it in her classic essay, “Total Eclipse,” from Teaching a Stone to Talk. Dillard likened the precise moment the moon completely blocked out the sun to a lid, a detached piece of sky, sliding into place. “The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover,” she wrote.
It was like that. When the totality of the eclipse occurred, it made me think of a large stone being rolled into place to close an ancient tomb. I could hear the rumble.
The image of the moon slowly but surely creeping across the sky toward its prey and gradually devouring it, only to relent and guiltily slink away, makes me think of how our feelings and our doubts can cloud our vision for our own lives. Our ability to hope and dream becomes obscured by distractions, jealousy, fear, and assumptions, so gradual that we don’t notice our capacity for imagination narrowing. Then suddenly something snaps, or slams, or rolls into place, and we can no longer see, and we want to throw all our dreams out the window and start over.
A total eclipse is illusory. We are plunged into a silvery darkness, the grass metallic, all colors surrendered to something like sepia, all the animals grown silent. It’s cold. We wonder what would happen if the sun quit its day job or the moon took its own too seriously and decided to continue covering up the sun. Would all life wither?
But the lesson here is that behind everything, even the mighty moon, there is a light. And this light is faithful. It shows up every morning to remind us that we will always have the means to see our way through.
In his poem, “Sweet Darkness,” David Whyte writes:
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.
But it isn’t the world’s job to find you and resurrect you. It’s yours. We’ve all been eclipsed at some point in our lives. We’ve heard the door slam shut and shivered in the midnight frost. Our vision has left us. Take heart. The stone always rolls away. The cap comes off. The light returns. In truth, just as in a solar eclipse, the light never left. Let the temporary fall away. Ride with the permanent. It’s always in you.
You may know this light by its other name: hope.