Carol Mackay Mertz

The Great American Eclipse of August 2017

by

Carol Mackay Mertz

Where were you during this cross country solar eclipse of August 2017?

I have never seen the totality of a solar eclipse.  Guidance simply insisted that I position myself in the path.

So I invited my family and they came with me.  We camped at a lovely South Carolina state park on Lake Keowee.  We got our reservations in January and our special eclipse glasses in May when they were cheap and you could still find them.  My husband, Skip and I brought our small camper, and our son, wife, and Grand daughter brought their large camper.  Our second son braved the experience in a tent.  We kayaked on the lake, visited a friend who lived nearby and got ready for the event.  It passed over us around 2:22 pm in the afternoon.

The following images depict its progress as we experienced it.

Top left is showing how much light there was approaching totality.  Top right is showing how far the eclipse has progressed as the tiny shadows on the tent tell you without looking at the sun how far along it is.  It took awhile to become twilight.  It was slow at first and then when the moon was almost covering the sun it became darker and darker.  There was a 2 plus minute totality.  The bottom picture is what the ground looked like during totality.  The horizon during totality is light, only standing directly beneath the shadow does it look completely dark.  The totality is only 70 miles across, so there will always be a twilight/partial eclipse on the horizon.

photo courtesy of Jonathan F. Mertz

This is our photographer son’s best image of totality.  A good shot considering he didn’t have a $10,000 lens.  What the super lenses caught was a lot of blue around the corona, which was our on the ground experience.  So the image I ended up painting was the experience of the eclipse.  I could see the blue of the sky around the totality but the lenses of our cameras could not distinguish it.  There were also plumes of light visible in the higher resolution images which is always the landscape of the sun as it gives off coronal plumes on a constant basis.

The visceral experience was transcendent.  No other word.  I was deeply moved to tears.  My tears come only when spirit is vibrating large in my vicinity.  There was a cheer that went up around the campground as totality was reached, no mistaking it, it was dramatic.  Afterwards people were talking and friendly to each other in a way we were not before the event.  We bonded during the experience and this continued until we left the campground two days later.

There was also this feeling in me,  this understanding that we all had witnessed a sacred movement in the heavens that would directly affect our lives and the lives of the planets and the universe.  No one act is ever without its affect on all manifestation around it.  This movement was a significant marker in this shift of consciousness we are all involved in at present 2012- 2027 and beyond.