It may only be visible on the other side of the world, but I feel it.
The one time I ever experienced a solar eclipse (and a partial one at that), I decided to divorce my first wife! This was as irrevocable as the motion of the heavenly bodies themselves. To me a solar eclipse is always associated with shake-ups and change, and this one is in my sun sign.
Right on schedule, then, a wave of alienation washed over me today. This morning I almost deleted my Facebook account, for example, and I may yet. “FaceBorg” disturbs me in the way things sometimes signal they’re unhealthy — perhaps it’s the way it mashes you through a template into marketable bits. Twitter, on the other hand, almost always lifts my spirits, whereas Facebook depresses me with its horrid interface and totalitarian slant. By way of contrast, although “tweeting” or “twittering” sounds ridiculous, the term at least confers some creaturehood.
This isn’t a social media rant, however, although the above is related and gets us halfway there. It’s more about this:
Today I felt a distant undertow, like my guts were caught in something bigger than life. I had to take a drive out south of town, up into the mountains, to where the current pulled me. I ended up driving along a certain highway, where I stopped and took that picture.
I’ve been up there on the very top (you can read about it here). There are no trails. Reaching the ridge was an exercise in completely intuitive hiking and abandoning all fear, otherwise I never would have made it, much less discovered the things I did, in a place so striking and powerful I knew not to take any pictures. That’s how sacred it was, by which I mean something you can’t help but feel, scary-strong and almost alien. And yet you know you’ve “been here” before. It’s the Mother, of course. If the time is right and you allow it, this is when the wall falls down.
The drive was necessary, then. I drank in the morning and remembered.
Shortly afterwards, huge black storms came rolling over Taos. They were still thundering and pouring when the electricity went out for about an hour, around the same time as total eclipse on the other side of the world.
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