A Deep River Year - 2017

There is much troubling news confronting us, but today it will be a celestial event that captures our attention. A solar eclipse will darken the sky over North America for a couple of hours, and many of us will go outside to experience this rare happening. The total eclipse will last only a couple of minutes, when the moon passes in front of the sun and blocks its light from reaching our planet. That moment of full darkness will be viewed in North America only by those in a narrow path stretching across the country, but the rest of us still may experience the darkening effect of a partial eclipse.

In earlier times, such an event would have been a portent of doom. In a pre-scientific world, the blackening of the sun was terrifying. Some saw it as an omen that an awful event was about to happen. The French king Louis XIV, the “sun king," who used a golden image of the sun as his symbol, died just after an eclipse, as did King Henry 1 of England. An ancient war ended in the midst of a battle when the sun suddenly darkened, and the combatants threw down their weapons and fled in terror. In some cultures, they believed that an eclipse meant that a great monster was rising up to devour the sun and destroy life on earth, so they would take pots and sticks and bang them together to scare the creature away. There are still monsters and evils in our world, of course. It would be nice if we could scare them away with a little noise-making, but it will take something more than that. Courage, wisdom, and love will help.

Eclipse

Sojourners together
under a darkened star,
we watch and feel a primal unease
as day turns to night.
There is a haunting silence,
the cry of owls,
the whisper of bad dreams
that will not go away.
And in our place of pilgrimage,
another great light is eclipsed
by a terrible moon:
the chaos of evil that circles around us,
always pulling at our tides,
rising in the old well of bone and blood,
occluding the artery that offers life
to all of us.
We are creatures, still,
kin to the eagles and the catfish,
yearning for the peace of oceans and prairies,
waiting for some tenderness to overtake
our wanton appetites
and something simple as love to rule
our fearsome passions.
We live short and shadowed lives,
pretend to goodness,
and find it now and then,
like a strain of music whose song
we can barely remember.
We keep searching,
and in our darkness,
we reach for each other's hands,
wait for some great spirit to move across
the roiled and forbidding waters.
So we gather together, silent partners
in this uneasy hour,
to watch for the rim of light
rippling at the edges of the darkness,
waiting, waiting,
for the great star to shine again.

--Timothy Haut