A whale spouting on the water’s surface.
A double rainbow after a storm.
A flower bearing fruit.
Dramatic natural events – like the Solar Eclipse on Monday, April 8th, which was visible for folks across a swath of Central and North America – remind us of Mother Earth’s awe-inspiring power.
Thanks to SK’s 1st/2nd grade teacher, Barbara, who tracked down several pair of ISO-certified eclipse viewing glasses, some students, teachers, admin, and parents at Summers-Knoll School were able to experience and witness the eclipse together.
During the eclipse, we imagined how people thousands of years ago perceived solar eclipses. It turns out there’s an entire field of study, archeoastronomy, devoted to such questions:
“We must be very careful about treating all cultures that came before us as capital-O ‘Other,’” says Anthony Aveni, a pioneer of archeoastronomy and professor emeritus at Colgate University. “They traveled a totally different road from Western eclipse science. Sometimes our questions can be misguided. Did they know the Earth was round? Did they know about the galaxy?” Those aren’t the right questions to ask, he says. “They didn’t live in our world.”
And we don’t live in theirs. With our ultraprecise clocks and compasses, we can often choose to forget the sky altogether—something unthinkable for many peoples of the past. “When it comes down to it, other cultures didn’t do things the way we do them,” Aveni says. “And that’s what makes studying them so fascinating” (Deluca, April 5, 2024, https://www.scientificamerican.com/).
But we need not wait for extraordinary natural events to appreciate the beauty all around us every day. The solar eclipse reminds us that, sometimes, we need to simply pause to remember that our life on planet Earth is small but precious, fleeting but significant, if for no other reason, simply because humanity is part of this natural world that engenders such awe. We can be reminded of this when we look into the eyes of a loved one or a stranger, when we feel the sun on our skin, or when we take a breath – we are here now. Simply being is worthy of celebration.