98% Is Not Totality

Knowing Isn't Experiencing

I knew what a total solar eclipse was.

I had seen the photographs. I had watched the videos. I understood what was going to happen: the Moon would move between the Earth and the Sun until, for a brief moment, it covered the Sun completely.

I knew all of that.

But knowing what would happen did not prepare me for experiencing it.

There are some things we can understand perfectly well in theory and still know almost nothing about until we are standing beneath them.

For me, a total solar eclipse was one of those things.

98% Is Not Almost 100%

Before seeing one, I might have assumed that 98% totality was essentially the same experience as 100%.

After all, what difference could the final two percent really make?

Almost everything, as it turns out.

During the partial eclipse, even when the Moon covered nearly all of the Sun, I was still watching an eclipse happen. The light changed. The world looked different. There was a growing sense of anticipation as the uncovered part of the Sun became smaller and smaller.

It was fascinating.
But it was still daylight.
And then the final sliver of sunlight disappeared.

That last fraction doesn't simply make the eclipse slightly darker or slightly more impressive.

It changes the experience completely.
98% and 100% may sit beside each other mathematically.
In reality, they belong to two different worlds.

Totality

The change came quickly.
The light fell away and suddenly the world was dark.

Only once the Sun was completely covered could I remove my eclipse glasses and look directly at what was happening above me.

And there it was.

A dark circle in the sky, surrounded by the pale light of the Sun's corona.

I had seen that image many times before.
I had never really understood it.

For approximately 80 seconds, I could simply look.

There was something almost impossible about seeing the Sun that way. Something so familiar — something that is present every day of our lives — had become completely unfamiliar.

Eighty seconds sounds short.

It felt both incredibly brief and strangely outside ordinary time.

And then it was over.

The first sunlight returned, the glasses went back on, and the world began becoming recognizable again.

Some Things Cannot Be Photographed

There are beautiful photographs of total solar eclipses.

Some capture the corona with far more detail than I could see with my own eyes. A good camera can preserve the shape, the light, the extraordinary dark circle where the Sun should be.

But a photograph only captures part of what happened.
It cannot quite capture the way the light around you changes.

The atmosphere.
The sky.
The reactions of the people standing nearby.

The sudden awareness that everyone around you is looking at exactly the same thing.

A photograph can show something close to what I saw.
It cannot show what it felt like to be there.
That may be the thing I remember most clearly.

A total solar eclipse isn't something you simply see.
You feel it.

Wonder Is Enough

It would be easy to give an experience like this a larger meaning.
To turn the darkness into a metaphor.
To make the returning light symbolize something.

But I don't think it needs any of that.
What happened was already extraordinary.

The Moon passed in front of the Sun.
For 80 seconds, daylight disappeared.

I stood beneath a darkened sky and saw something I had previously known only through photographs.

And I felt wonder.

Perhaps that is enough.

Not everything in nature needs to become a lesson, a symbol, or a message meant especially for us.

Sometimes we can simply look up.
Pay attention.
And be amazed.

Grow slowly.

— Soulseed