Eclipse and Patience

Eclipse and Patience

   The other night, my wife and I woke up at 2 in the morning to view the lunar eclipse (when the newsfolk said the eclipse would happen), then 3 (when the eclipse actually started), then 4 to witness the eclipse more than halfway through.  Carl Sagan worked and worked to get our thinking away from a "rising"  or "setting" sun and have us think more of witnessing earth's rotation (the sun stayed where it was; it was our earth rotating that made the sun appear to move around our planet).  It was much the same with the eclipse, witnessing our earth and moon slowly aligning in their respective rotations, the earth blocking the sun's light to cast its shadow on the moon  (the brightness of a full moon is about 10% of the sun's light at day, the dark surface of the moon absorbing much of the visible light).

   What was even more dazzling (perhaps I should say equally dazzling) was that once the shadow began, the stars emerged with a vengeance, as if camouflaged soldiers briefly appearing and disappearing...but there.  Of course, they're always there, throughout the day, throughout the night.  It is our thinking, our vision, that makes us feel as if they've disappeared for a bit.

   Which made me think of our visiting mothers, mine being 89 and my wife's being 85.  We're lucky to have them, as are any of you who still have your mothers...let's face it, without them you wouldn't be here.  You came from their womb, a tiny thing, wobbly and noisy and one heck of a lot of work for quite awhile.  But here you are.  Still, as nice as it is with any sort of company, your routine is temporarily disrupted and sometimes it tests one's patience.  This disruption could be very temporary, such as a quick visit; or it could be longer, a point of reaching a physical or mental disability that suddenly leaves no option other than to change your routine drastically.  Perhaps this is how your mother felt upon discovering she was pregnant with you.

   But the shadowing world, slowly coming and then equally slowly fading away, reminded my wife and I that patience comes in many forms.  As tired as we were, this was an event we had witnessed only a few times, a chance that comes about every 2.5 years .  The term for this alignment, this perfect melding of sun, earth and full moon is called syzygy, which lightly translates into "being paired together" (from the Greek language).  It was an appropriate description, my wife and I standing there, our mothers sound alseep.  For we had just finished a full night of playing cards, laughing and dancing, joking as never before...perhaps it was our own family eclipse, an alignment of mothers and daughters and sons.

   In this time of year, when the weather is cooling (at least at this end of the planet) and the trees and animals are getting ready to nestle in for the winter, it is a good time to think about those moments of frustration and impatience, whether with friends or family (or animals).  Those moments are bound to occur, perhaps more often that we wanted (why now, we ask, things were going so smoothly).  But the passage of time diminishes those frustrations, and, if we take the time to be a bit more patient, to be a bit more considerate, we just might notice that shadow revealing all those stars, all that love...always there, hidden at times, but always there.