Dear friends, happy May Day, Beltane, Walpurgis — whatever you choose to name this time between spring and summer in the northern hemisphere.
This newsletter was supposed to go out yesterday, but I needed to rest, and I’m glad I did. Life can sometimes feel like a slog: putting food on the table, paying the bills, making ends meet, oh look it’s tax season again, how is it already May and what have I accomplished this year so far?
Daily life can sometimes feel like an endless grind to participate in the capitalist machine. And somehow, this motivated me to write about awe.
I had the great fortune to witness my first total solar eclipse on August 21, 2017 in Painted Hills, Oregon. Without exaggeration, it was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen in my life. There is nothing else like it.
It was noon and then one minute later it was midnight — the warm air suddenly became cold, stars popped out in the darkness, and there was a 360° sunset on the horizon. At the center of attention was a black orb in the sky, ringed with white fire. It lasted for 2 minutes, then daylight came flooding back.
You would think this phenomenon would be more gradual, given that it takes roughly 90 very slow minutes for the moon to completely cover the sun. But the smallest sliver of sunlight, even if the sun is 99% covered, makes a huge difference: 1% of the sun’s rays poking out from behind the moon is still just as bright as an overcast day.
The moment the sun is completely obscured (called “totality”) the transition from light-to-dark, day-to-night, warm-to-cold, is abrupt and instantaneous, which is partly what makes the total eclipse so dramatic and unusual.
When prompted to recall memories of wonder and awe, the total solar eclipse is at the top of my list. So when the opportunity came to see it again, I was surprised to find that I had mixed feelings.
Surely something so incredible would be met with enthusiasm to experience twice? Only the eclipse in Oregon was swiftly followed by one of the worst traffic jams I’ve ever been stuck in. What should have been a three hour drive turned into a nine hour bumper-to-bumper exodus. Thousands of people had made the same pilgrimage, and gas stations ran out of gas. People were exiting their cars to pee on the side of the road.
Beyond the traffic, traveling is expensive, time consuming, and not very eco-friendly. And thanks to clouds, there’s no guarantee that the eclipse would even be visible despite traveling hundreds of miles to see it. We got incredibly lucky in Oregon — the wildfire smoke that year threatened to envelop the skies, but we had one clear day before the following week was shrouded in smoke.
I was happy to keep this once-in-a-lifetime memory singular, rather than gamble at another shot. April weather is notoriously fickle. Maybe I didn’t want to be let down?
The one thing that got me on board to go eclipse-chasing again was Thane. His birthday was well timed with the 2024 eclipse, and this is what he wanted to do. We saw the 2017 eclipse together, and how often does a total solar eclipse coincide with your birthday?
The skies were blue upon arrival, but there was rain in the forecast. On the day of the eclipse, we got incredibly lucky, again. Despite the patchy, indecisive cloud cover, the winds were moving fast and the “diamond ring” was just barely visible between momentary gaps in the clouds. The next day it poured rain.
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A portal, a void, a black hole in the sky. I can totally see why ancient cultures would have been terrified if they saw this and didn’t know what it was. But knowing that it’s the moon passing in front of the sun somehow makes it more incredible. The moon is 400 times smaller than the sun, yet the sun is 400 times farther away. What are the chances?
It’s a celestial reality check that we all inhabit an orb floating amongst other orbs. It’s easy to forget that the moon is spinning around the earth which is spinning around the sun which part of a solar system amongst thousands of other solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy, which is rotating amongst billions (possibly trillions) of other galaxies in the cosmos, and we’re all just circling around in the universe on a scale beyond quantifiable comprehension. This doesn’t make paying the bills any easier but it’s good to zoom out every so often.
It was a big reminder of how important the experience of awe is. Having a sense of wonder is an essential part of my creative practice, but sometimes it’s easy to forget this when I get caught up in the humdrum of routine. There are studies suggesting that awe is critical to our wellbeing, and Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, states that “Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world.”1
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Even if the clouds had rolled in and the eclipse wasn’t visible that day, just being outside of my usual environment helped me to notice moments of wonder and awe. I think because I was open to the possibility of being amazed, everything started to become amazing. Birdsongs at dawn, thousands of crickets singing at night, frogs in the creek, pink tipped clouds at sunset. And this opened up access to memories of other times I’ve felt a sense of awe.
One core memory is at Sunset Beach in Olympia, Washington. I was with a group of friends, and when we fell silent, we noticed a quiet yet all-encompassing noise: a gentle symphony of fizzing and popping. It took a minute to realize that this was the sound of millions of barnacles, opening and closing, breathing, endlessly. It sounded like milk being poured over Rice Krispies cereal except the cereal was everywhere for miles around. Just remembering this sound still makes my skin tingle.
Painting is a way to continually remind myself that portals to awe are actually all around us, even if it doesn’t always feel like it. And if I can’t access wonderment in the moment, painting can become a visual list of things that have brought me awe in the past, and a nudge to seek these things out again in the future.
Sunset hues frequently show up in my artwork, because sunsets and sunrises are something that I never tire of, and they are probably one of the most frequent and consistent sources of awe that I experience.
What generates a sense of awe is different for everyone, the same way that we all have different tastes in food and music, and how we process this will be different for everyone too. For me it’s visual arts, but for you, it might be music, writing, or going for a long walk. Visual art is my way of asking questions or expressing something that I don’t quite have the words for.
This might seem unrelated, but I’ll close out today’s newsletter with the fact that this month I learned that “nargulas” exist. A narluga is a hybrid species, a cross between a narwhal and a beluga. This is a real creature! It is very, very rare.
I love imagining that there are so many things out there that we still don’t know about or haven’t seen yet. I hope the unknown unknowns outlast us.
Wishing you all a moment of awe soon.
Love,
Melanie
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