The Total Solar Eclipse of 2017

August 29, 2017

We’re magnetized by minerals on high. It’s why the ancients traced the heavens with their shrines, why there’s Stonehenge and Giza, remnants of the cosmic centric frame of mind. We’re charted out in constellations, each of us, every dream and disposition a culmination of the wheeling of celestial bodies. The planets pull on us in ways we cannot see.

I travelled to Redmond, Oregon to experience the eclipse with a woman named Teresa Leigh Ander. I’d read about the event and wanted to witness it in its full expression, exclusive to that strip of land where the sun becomes blotted out. Such is the phase I find myself in that I would experience numerous ego-killing enchantments that day, each peeling back layers of my psyche I knew existed but couldn’t access.

It’s part of a tradition of being overtaken by events I couldn’t dream up, what you might call nonfictional fairy tales, not the whitewashed kind but the stuff from old growth forests where beings from the otherworld carry you off to disembody you.

That’s the essence of the last decade. For ten years, I’ve lived a sacred illness. I’ve been immersed in an eclipse of my own.

That’s what I realized as the moon darkened the life-giving sun, as I sat in a field in central Oregon and the land grew dim. A horse came over to me and I realized that what they say about eclipses is true, that the veil becomes thin. The dimensions start to bleed into each other.

My spine switched on... I trembled and saw the cognitive material holding me back... I looked up... there was the unthinkable black sphere... I let everything go.

Something happened that day, something that defies logical explanation. A magic came about that I’ve experienced a handful of times in my life.

A new sun emerged.

In the hours following the eclipse, a series of finely tuned synchronicities unfolded as I met with Teresa. I received further resolution of the material that had haunted me for so long. She received a series of achingly beautiful visions outlining my future.

Teresa had produced this painting earlier that day in a fit of inspiration, just as the moon slipped over the remaining traces of sun.

I thought you might like to see it.