The Procession
On Monday morning, April 8th my wife and I joined a procession.
Maybe it should have occurred to us that we would be joining a procession that morning, but it had not and there we were. A procession is defined as a group of people or vehicles moving forward in an orderly fashion, especially as part of a ceremony or festival. This was a procession of hundreds of cars slowing creeping up I-24 from Nashville toward Paducah, Ky which was just within the eclipse path. It was normally a 2-hour drive to Paducah; it took the procession 5 hours.
We had planned on getting an early start to drive up to Crab Orchard Lake near Carbondale, IL, a 3-hour drive, to watch the eclipse near the center of its path. We allowed an extra hour to get there, packed up a picnic lunch and headed out on the highway. Traffic was moving fast down I-65 however as we exited onto I-24 traffic was moving at a slow crawl. We thought, good thing we started early. We had joined a procession to see the last eclipse in the US for 20 years or so.
For some it was a family outing, for others it was kind of a spiritual pilgrimage, still others, like truck drivers, were just caught up in the procession, no doubt trashing their schedules. The procession proceeded mostly at a crawl all the way to Paducah.
We drove on through Paducah a little further west, crossed the Ohio River into the Illinois countryside and found a meadow at the side of a rural road to spread out our picnic on a blanket to watch the eclipse. We still had our glasses from the 2017 eclipse and laid on our backs to watch the moon move across the sun which was already halfway across. We were amazed at how bright everything remained even with just a tiny sliver of the sun still showing but as soon at the moon centered on the sun the sky darkened and the temperature dropped 10 degrees. We could see Venus shining brightly on one side of the Sun and Jupiter on the other. We knew Mars was up there near Venus too, but we couldn’t see the Red Planet. The darkness inspired silence in what seemed like a holy few minutes deserving of reverence.
As the Sun peeked out from behind the moon the sky returned to close to normal and we played in light for a time before we packed up and headed home. It took a while just to get back to Paducah and we hadn’t eaten a meal all day, so we stopped in town to get a sandwich. Since we had our dog with us we got a fast-food meal at the window so we could stay in the car. We noticed our server looked exhausted and asked how his day had been. He said it had been a non-stop solid line from the time be got there at noon. The streets of town were jammed, which was true of nearly every exit along the way. As we again joined the procession it took another 5 hours to get back to home to Nashville. I could not help wondering how many thousands of people made that procession, not just in Tennessee as there were such processions all across the nation.
It was a day of reflection and renewal. Shifting our viewpoint on life’s issues can reveal new solutions. Our world certainly needs them. Or perhaps it is acknowledging what is truly valuable in life, setting an intention to remember that and perhaps adopting a fresh perspective on the world.