Presiding Over an Eclipse

The sun is many times larger than the moon, and when the tiny moon blocks our view, we call that an eclipse.  And from where we stand, that is what things look like. But if we were standing somewhere else—another planet for example—as far as we were concerned the same position of moon, Earth, and sun would not mean anything.  So actually an eclipse depends on us, on our situation; it is not some absolute event.  Our view of the sun is blocked by the tiny moon because our viewscreen is only a certain size, viewed from a specific position in space, and aimed in a particular direction.

Like this, our personal viewscreen has a limited circumference.  A small piece of paper in front of our eyes will keep us from seeing even the most magnificent view.  And the viewscreen of our mind is also like that.  A small worry, a temporary concern, a story line, can take up the space in front of our mind’s eye so that we can’t see anything beyond it.

We have so much to be grateful for, there is so much fullness and beauty in life—as well as all the horrors—but our sense of the glory of being alive, of being able to feel, to think, to love, to touch, to give and receive, can be blocked by what occupies the mind and fills the viewscreen.  Even though the vastness of existence is all around us, even though the source of life is within us and shining all around, the tiny moon of what occupies us at any given moment blocks that view.

We may not be able to move to another planet, but we can change our line of attention and we can widen our field of view.  We can expand the iris of our mind’s eye to let in more light and take in that which is much larger than whatever has been blocking our vision. We don’t have to cede the ground of our attention to whatever thought, whatever image, whatever concern happens to cross our mind.  We don’t have to allow that eclipse to continue. There is a much wider field, a much brighter sun, that we can be aware of; and whatever is going on at the moment is only a tiny part of that infinity, that vastness.  In bringing that wider view into the forefront of our awareness, a tiny moon can no longer block our vision.

And then we are positioned rightly to preside over an eclipse.

© 2022 Shanti Natania Grace
Illustration from TimeandDate.com

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As If to Demonstrate an Eclipse
– Billy Collins

I pick an orange from a wicker basket
and place it on the table
to represent the sun.
Then down at the other end
a blue and white marble
becomes the earth
and nearby I lay the little moon of an aspirin.

I get a glass from a cabinet,
open a bottle of wine,
then I sit in a ladder-back chair,
a benevolent god presiding
over a miniature creation myth,

and I begin to sing
a homemade canticle of thanks
for this perfect little arrangement,
for not making the earth too hot or cold
not making it spin too fast or slow

so that the grove of orange trees
and the owl become possible,
not to mention the rolling wave,
the play of clouds, geese in flight,
and the Z of lightning on a dark lake.

Then I fill my glass again
and give thanks for the trout,
the oak, and the yellow feather,

singing the room full of shadows,
as sun and earth and moon
circle one another in their impeccable orbits
and I get more and more cockeyed with gratitude.