Videos hosted by Michael Erlewine

I have written about eclipses so often here, that I will spare you my spiel. Instead, the best I can offer today is a little stream-of-consciousness patter. Hope it does not offend. I post it today, so that you will be reminded of the lunar eclipse tomorrow morning.

The astronomers tell me that the lunar eclipse tomorrow morning at 7:07 AM EDT perhaps can be seen, and that the Moon may turn red or possibly even turquoise during a totality that may last five minutes. Eclipses are always a visionary time for me, “visions” not like the comic-book picture-in-the-sky idea, but rather as visions in reality are, a sobering, shuddering glimpse at the truth that shakes us to the bone, one that cannot but reset our clock with its imprint, thus marking the beginning of another round of Groundhog Day, a new cycle.

Tomorrow’s Lunar eclipse is the other end of the Solar Eclipse that eclipsed us two weeks ago, and from which I am still recovering; I’m still trying to round that bend into some kind of new normal, like the line from the old song “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.” Sure, when she comes. Another line and this is one I made up, “The straighter the line, the finer the curve,” speaks to that eternal return, circle, or cycle. It all comes back to me, but not just now.

It reminds me of a moment when the great siddha Chögyam Trungpa (while teaching me to meditate) told me to exhale completely, to let all of my breath just go out. And when I hesitated, he said with a little smile, “Don’t worry Michael, it will come back.” Well, I want to be the “Comeback Kid,” that’s for sure, but saying and doing are two different things. Sometimes I worry.

What infinite curve of a trajectory am I on, of the variety “Second star to the right and straight on till morning?” Sometimes it seems only a matter of faith that things will turn around, that what appears as my freight-train personality on a straight track hurtling into the night of time will eventually curve and bring me back to myself, a re-union with a self that by then perhaps is no one I know, care to know, or, more likely, one I already know too well.

I hate to be just a passenger in my own lifeline. I insist on going to meet my maker head-on. But how to measure miles in millimeters, which is all that I know. Like I always tell myself, it is hard to be a poet, by which I mean it is hard to stay at the point of being a poet and not just blow right through poetry into prose or on to writing nothing at all – hovering at silence. It would seem that hovering at poetry must take a hovercraft I don’t have.

Sometimes being an explainer is too much like being a complainer. A commentator is kin to being a critic and no one likes a critic. It occurs that we might best beware what we wish for or even beware what we think is cool. I used to tell myself that one day, when I am old, Walmart and places like that would (by that time) have my number down cold and everything they sell might be the epitome of what I think is good taste. Everywhere I look might be wonderful. Older people seem to like everything, to have turned their glove inside out. So perhaps it is not so much a circle as a torus at which we are at the vortex. Just sayin’.