Eclipsed

It was almost disconcerting tonight, the lunar ecplise in the middle of everything, so quick and so distant I almost lost it amid the city lights. And, yet, sitting on my front stoop for twenty minutes or so watching, and it was like another world. I could just barely make out the waning moon caught between the treetops and apartment blocks, but it took my breathaway.

I wished I were gazing at the sky from somewhere else, away from the city lights, away from the Safeway, away from the traffic. But at the same time, it sort of touched me, that something so simple could draw so very many people. That all across the country everyone was doing the very same thing.

The take home message of the week? It's so easy to be eclipsed by everything going on around me, far too easy to go unnoticed. The temptation to pull the hood up and poke the headphones in, to be the one on the bus who turns the other way while someone struggles on the sidewalk, it's the easy answer. To sit in my little book-cave and ignore the night sky. Complacency though, too, makes me internally uncomfortable. I both crave and fear the challenge of pushing myself.