The view Up North
We won't see a total eclipse in the Traverse City area. But the partial eclipse will begin at 1:58 p.m., and end at 4:24 p.m. Maximum eclipse, with just over 87 percent of the sun covered, will happen at 3:12. Be sure and wear ISO-certified protective eyewear.
In 2016 the poet WS Merwin wrote:
Brightness appears showing us
Everything
it reveals the splendors it calls everything
but shows it to each of us alone
and only once and only to look at
not to touch or hold in our shadows
And though he was writing about what he called “The Wings of Daylight,” the mood here captures something quite lovely with regard to what happens during a solar eclipse.
By now it should go without say that there are few spectacles in the natural world that are as dramatic as a Total Eclipse of the Sun, an event that happens with rhythmic regularity, although not always over such heavily populated areas this one.
For me, what is most striking is the way the shadow falls because, though the Earth is turning east, giving the impression that the Sun is traveling west, the path of an eclipse shadow goes eastward, with the Earth, but much faster than the Earth.
This might seem like an insignificant thing, which direction a shadow falls, but when it happens during an eclipse it reveals that the cosmic harmony out there is so intimately embedded in our sense of things as to be unconscious in us, so much so that even the slightest, momentary alteration of what we think is immutable, like the rotation of the Earth, defies our capacity to make sense of it — and this is the thrill!
At the end of his poem, Merwin wrote:
everything will leave us except the
shadows
but the shadows carry the whole story
at first daybreak they open their long wings.
Find the whole poem here.
