By the time you read this, the book I co-authored, Your Postpartum Body, will be out in the world.
For ten years I’ve been throwing manuscripts at the wall of literary agents to see what might stick and have often richly imagined the moment when a book with my name on it might be a tangible reality. Now that it’s almost here, I find that I might not be big enough to hold all my feelings. I think of myself as cool, calm, collected, a veritable Vulcan in the face of the big life moments, but it’s time to face facts: I’m as susceptible to awe as the next tiny speck in the universe.
There have been plenty of opportunities to experience the majesty of the cosmos and find those big feelings in a less personal, more global way this year, and I was fortunate enough to experience both eclipse totality and the aurora borealis.
High on a hill above Rangeley Lake, we had a perfect, almost private viewing spot.
The eclipse opportunity came about when my colleague and friend invited Penrose and me (because I badgered her relentlessly) to join her family in Rangeley at a house they had rented months earlier through foresight and good planning.
High on a hill above Rangeley Lake, we had a perfect, almost private viewing spot. We had snacks, a playlist, Adirondack chairs carried to the top of a snowplow pack, and plenty of eclipse glasses.
Everything felt fun and festive until totality neared. The sky grew dim, colors faded, the temperature dropped several degrees. All things that had been predicted and described but which in the moment I found unnerving.
A sense of dread built in my stomach as the sun entered the diamond ring stage and shortly thereafter vanished. I was my distant ancestor, gazing at the sky, desperately hoping for the return of the beloved sun. I was a small mammal, confused and aggrieved, awakened for my nocturnal cycle unexpectedly, or driven to my den ahead of schedule.
The sun, of course, returned. We packed up the picnic and walked back down to the house, popping our eclipse glasses on from time to time to check that the sun was still returning to its full strength, but no longer in the thrall of a cosmic event that felt, for two minutes and 30 seconds, like the end of the world.
Earlier in May, I was off island with students when all of our Instagram accounts were suddenly flooded with spectacular photos of the aurora borealis. We’d been at Portland Stage, watching their spectacular production of Angels in America, but started to feel the FOMO (fear of missing out) regardless.
Determined not to miss it, we drove out of the city in search of a dark enough sky to catch our own light show. A little way out of town at a trailhead, we could just see foggy streaks that, through a long-exposure photo, were revealed to be the Northern Lights. But we couldn’t believe there wasn’t more to the phenomenon, so we kept going until we found a soccer field.
The students ran out into the dewy grass and we chaperones followed, a little slower and more cautiously. The streaks were more prominent here, and a slight coloring could be detected that we didn’t see in town.
“It just looks like clouds,” one of them kept saying, disappointed at the difference between the in-camera and out of camera experience.
I stood still, looking straight up. What had seemed like clouds suddenly writhed towards the very center of the sky, twisting and contorting unnaturally. The same feeling of dread and awe I’d experienced at totality crept back into my belly. I urged the rest of the group to do the same, and the complaints ceased as everyone absorbed the sight of the surge of solar energy dancing to its own rhythm. No photo had prepared me for the sensation.
It feels arrogant to compare an eclipse and an aurora to a book release, but from what I’ve learned about my capacity for awe, there are some big emotions coming my way soon, unpredictable and a little frightening, but there for the purpose of opening and expanding my heart to the world.
Courtney Naliboff lives on North Haven where she teaches at the North Haven Community School and plays in the band Bait Bag. She may be contacted at Courtney.Naliboff@gmail.com.
