We live in perpetual motion around a star. As a metaphor, deity and mystery, our star’s various memetic incarnations derive from its constancy of power and presence, yet we still know precious little about it. The long life span of trees relative to that of humans makes studying them difficult. Similarly, understanding the life of a star is an infinitely more daunting endeavor and in many ways an eternal puzzle, one that we can only observe indirectly, mediated through technology, projecting ourselves into the future and past, and only in the briefest of blinks. We know that our star is not magical, that it obeys known laws of physics and nuclear chemistry, that it is incredibly far from us, yet we can feel it on our skin, and as we consume the products of its excitations and marvel at the games it plays, we continue to spin around and around its eternal light. A place of constant origin, only one of an infinity of others that speak to us from the night sky. A contradictory and alien being, our sun.

On Monday I watched our moon eclipse this star from a field in Corvallis, hundreds of people laying or sitting in the grass with lawn chairs and blankets, drinking morning cocktails, chasing rambunctious dogs and kids, telescopes and cameras trained to the sky. As the light dimmed and the world changed color, the shadows through an old redwood sprayed a hundred crescent suns across the ground, all of us wondering at the fascinating pattern of light and shadow in the dirt. At the moment of totality, cheers and gasps filled the air, life holding its breathe on the cool wind, wonder and fear echoing back through thousands of such events throughout human history.

Intellectually I was aware of the process as a consequence of orbits, relative distances and coincidental alignment, but the animal within howled. I stood there in the stop-time of fear and curiosity so common to the human animal, wondering at what I was seeing, not with my eyes but with my being. A part of me knew that I was looking at the corona of the sun, but such explanations have no bearing on the emotional component of such an event. In that moment I felt an awesome and terrible presence. I can now understand why such events have inspired panic and sacrifice. I have only once before felt something similar about the sun, my first morning in the sands of Kuwait, the sun rising as a pale blue disc on the horizon, its visible rays feeble and weak, yet its power all around me in the 120 degree air. The sun as an embrace, a holy gesture of an ambivalent god, a passing terror, a perpetually unknowable entity driving art, religion, science and life together under its rays.

I am becoming a scientist. I am the recipient of a vast canon of knowledge about the world we live in, a gift from our ancestors. I have been given many tools to inquire about the workings of nature, to ensure that I am not seeing only what I want to see, or the spirits of habit and superstition. I have a community of passionate and experienced scientists from around the globe that I can call on for help and guidance, yet this is a relatively recent state of affairs. Staring at the sun and moon in alignment I found myself remembering all of those who came before and confronted such phenomena without science. They possessed the same mind and intellectual powers as I, an inheritance of knowledge and experience to keep them alive, and a cultural narrative to order the why’s and how’s of the world, but no science. Those people put stones in circles, piled them high toward the stars and consecrated them with human blood in the effort to understand and control the powers of life and death. I remember and honor those ancestor’s efforts, the generations of sacrifice and confusion that led to here and now, to me. Confronted by the mystery and terror of an eclipse, I must have felt much as they did, quaking at the sight of the sun blotted out by the moon, an event that shouldn’t be.

I have struggled both intellectually and emotionally this summer in pursuit of science. Standing before a wonder of life on planet earth, I was reminded that a part of my being remains untouched and untouchable by science and intellect, that at some level I am unable to completely integrate what I know from science with what I feel with my being. Like the sun, I am a mysterious power of contradiction that defies explanation, even as I seek to explain this condition and the world around me. Much remains hidden in the light.