Total Eclipse

In August 2017, along with 30.000 others, I ventured onto a 55.000-acre farm in Oregon known as Big Summit Praerie. The ground was tinder dry, and just looking at the carpet of pine needles made it feel they could ignite. That summer, fire season had ravaged the West Coast of the United States, and the looming threat of cancellation or mass evacuation hung over the festival. It was a festival I came to attend, all centred around the approaching main event, a full solar eclipse. The first one to traverse the entire United States in 100 years. The first one I would ever witness.

I travelled north from San Francisco in an old, battered RV—a veteran of numerous festivals—with our Grateful Dead-loving driver, Nick. When you share similar musical tastes, an eight-hour journey can swing by all the faster. We skipped through a back catalogue of shared favourites from the 1960s onwards and found ourselves languishing contentedly with Dylan, Garcia, and The Band. I sat in the front, and behind me, chirping away happily, were four Portuguese passengers, all of us on route to the festival.

Travelling across the world to attend a huge festival on an expansive prairie on the outskirts of Oregon State sounds like the kind of thing you might have been planning for some months. The reality is that I decided to go about 2 weeks before. The decision happened over the course of a cup of tea. As it brewed, I stumbled on a post online from an acquaintance who was selling a ticket. As I sipped the tea, I secured the purchase of said ticket, and as I finished the tea, I had my flight booked. As I got up from the table, I was giddy with excitement, thoughts of planning and of the impending adventure filling me with energy like no other news possibly could.

Something kept telling me I should be at this festival. Its approach hovered on the edges of my awareness throughout the summer; even with a few weeks to go, I held onto that belief, and then that ticket landed on my lap in my kitchen in Cork.

I pitched my tiny tent beside the teepees in the One Nation Camp. The activists from the Standing Rock protest camp, who oppose the Dakota Access Pipeline, established this area. Beside me was a chief of some Central American tribe I knew nothing of. He’d wake up in the morning in full head dress and ceremonial clothes, stretch his arms to the skies, say buenos dias, then consider what might be breakfast for that day. I had no permission to be in this area whatsoever. But I kept quiet and unassuming—a small representative of Irish lands—pitching his small home away from the sea of tents and camper vans in the fields across the way.

On Day 4 of the festival, the full solar eclipse was due. 10.32 a.m., and the skies above were cloudless. People began to gather in the main viewing area.

Nothing can prepare you for what happens next. And here is the reason why I remember this experience now:.

It is too much for us to grasp the immensity of our reality. We are a small blue marble in an infinite amount of space, and we are travelling in cycles of rotational speed—the earth rotating on its axis at 1600 kilometres per hour, circling the sun at 107,226 kilometres per hour, and being carried throughout the Milky Way at 720,000 kilometres per hour. Barring travelling into space and switching our observation of our planet from the outside looking in, nothing can help us make that switch and grasp our place in the universe. Nothing but a full solar eclipse, that is. Because when totality takes place and you are standing in the path of totality for a moment, you are both on this planet and outside of it. The Sun and the Moon, together with the Earth, play a beautiful sleight of hand trick. The sun dissapears, and in her absence, it is more present in your awareness than ever before.

The moment transforms you.

It changed me.

That moment brought a tear to my eye. The sheer immensity of this cosmic story we are a part of blasts into your awareness. In that moment, you are taken beyond all belief systems and separation; everyone in that field was one and the same. Everyone shared the same awe and was humbled by it.

People become eclipse chasers after that first experience.

So take your diary in hand and mark this date, August 12th, 2026. I have been counting down the days until it comes. For those of you in Europe, that will be your chance to witness this event closer to home. A total solar eclipse will pass through the north of Spain.

I intend to be there.

D