I smile into the radiance
of this high desert sun
On the day of the 2024 solar eclipse, I was cloistered in a rental house a few miles outside Dillon, Montana. In nobody’s estimation would Dillon serve as a fantastic locale for eclipse-viewing, but I was unconcerned. So unconcerned I didn’t even realize the big event was scheduled for Monday. Once I’d caught up with the world, I decided, on my sister’s recommendation, to create a time-lapse video of the landscape as it underwent its transformation. This rental house has stunning floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking some far-off peaks and I thought I might record a dramatic metamorphosis from sharp shadows to blurred, from the splendor of midday to the murk of dusk.
Instead, a cloud passed over the sun just as the peak of our partial eclipse occurred. Dimness we had, but not solely from a moony culprit, I thought. I went outside and snapped a picture through my car’s sunroof, revealing a clouded sun…but with a round bite cleanly nipped from its edge! Then I drove to the Patagonia outlet and bought a moon-colored fleece because they were on sale and because I wanted to honor that moon, that Moon…the one who can extinguish the sun, even for just a few moments.
These couple of days in Dillon have pulled my mind many places. I spent hours on my first day here lying on the couch, watching through those tall windows across the plains prickly with dead prairie grasses and sagebrush. This is tumbleweed country, where the wind combs acres of yellowed stalks with long, dry fingers like a daydreaming mother stroking her infant’s hair. Small dusty desert plants reach across the baked mud, seeking moisture and perhaps solar energy too. Pronghorn graze nearby, and tiny newborn calves nap in straw scattered across their dun pasture. This morning, a pair of meadowlarks called to one another as I ventured outside for a moment of breezy coffee.
Sitting alongside these impossible windows, I’m pondering the extreme nature of this high-elevation environment, but also how things often are not as they seem. These plants that appear dead are merely dormant, and I wonder how this view will change in eight weeks or so, when spring rains curtain across this withered land and quicken it to a vibrant green. As with the eclipse, where clouds seemed to pre-empt the Moon’s effect, still she played a role in the celestial event, and it simply bore looking closely to see her.
Moderation has never been a strength of mine. I thrive on saturation. Even hours, or days, of solitude, such as the time spent in this place, could be considered an extreme of sorts that I find not just enticing, but essential. I think I know me pretty well, but I still hope to surprise myself at times. Maybe in me too, things aren’t as they seem. In recent years I’ve found I have the fortitude to angle a path up a mountainside, the patience to navigate miles of labyrinths, the inner quiet to hear the trees whisper to one another on a summer day. What trait, or desire, or curiosity lies dormant inside me that could yet spring up? I wait.
In the meantime I smile into the radiance of this high desert sun and invite the winds to tangle my hair. Night settles over the darkening plain, and a carpet of silver sequins unrolls across the sky. The ancestors whisper to us in words we can hear only when we become our true selves.