The Wonder of it All
Cosmic phenomena offer a brief reprieve from grief and burnout, but what I really need is community.
If nature is a balm to the soul, cosmic events are portals to wonder, and these days I’ll take all the wonder I can get. The comet that appeared in the western sky last week was like a fuse sizzling along the neural pathways that had only six months ago exploded with awe at the solar eclipse. Unlike the eclipse, the comet was hard to locate. It took a night sky app and a photo for me to know where to look and finally perceive the evanescent comet in the indigo sky. If I looked too hard or too directly, it evaporated back into the darkness.
These two celestial wonders bracketed six months of nearly constant overwhelm and grief against a backdrop of live-streamed genocide and political gaslighting. In June, we were stunned by the tragic accidental death of our younger daughter’s beloved track and cross-country coach and teacher. Chip was a central figure in Hazel’s high school experience, one of those essential unrelated adults who help guide your kids out in the world. It was her first experience with this type of personal loss, and we navigated it together the best we could, recalling funny memories and acknowledging his impact on Hazel’s life.
We’d just caught our breath in early August when I answered a late-night call from our older daughter, Lily, wailing in anguish that her dog Boris was dying. I thought she was confused – of her two dogs surely it was 13-year-old Bronte who was failing, her childhood dog that she reclaimed to ward off loneliness in the early days of the pandemic. It couldn’t be her robust young boxer, Boris. I thought she was overreacting, too, because she is very sensitive about her pets’ wellbeing and can be prone to catastrophizing (she comes by it honestly). But no, it was Boris, and he was dying from heatstroke.
Lily was two hours away at a music festival in Montreal, frantically trying to get back to say goodbye. I had to help her let him go over the phone while sobbing and kneeling next to my husband’s bedside, honestly wondering if she would survive it. It was one of the most brutal experiences of my life, and certainly of hers. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much – for sweet, silly Boris, who lived with my husband and me for a few months last winter while Lily traveled, but mostly for our daughter, who’d lost an essential source of unconditional love. She hasn’t been able to move easily through the stages of grief because her soul dog died horribly due to the negligence of the pet sitter, who refuses to take accountability.
These excruciating losses, on top of the general sense that we are living through the collapse of civilization, make it near impossible to function some days, let alone feel hope and purpose. But Comet A3 gave me a little injection of wonder and perspective. It brought me back to that hilltop in April, where we stood awestruck as the eclipse’s preternatural pallor dulled the landscape’s edges, cast bizarre shadows, and silenced the birds gathered in a nearby tree. Just before totality struck, the crows erupted in a raucous chorus, followed by the people gathered a bit to our south. We followed suit a few seconds later, or at least I did. I was overcome with emotion and wonder as the aura blazed and sparked around the impossibly dark moon shadow. I opened a staff meeting the next day with the check-in prompt, “How were you transformed by the eclipse?!” This video captures the moment - but be forewarned, my awe is expressed by yelling and swearing.
Determined to hold on to this feeling, I researched eclipse tattoo designs and investigated places to stay in northern Spain in the path of the 2026 totality. But realistically, my nervous system needs me to cultivate wonder and joy in the spaces between total eclipses and comets that pass by once every 80,000 years. Typically, I find it in nature – walking in the woods or paddling my kayak on a remote pond. For the past year and a half, weekends have been consumed with renovating a 200-year-old farmhouse, which brings a different kind of reward as I envision life on a hilltop beside a tunnel of ancient maples. It’s where we watched the eclipse, where I’ll plant a garden and set up my sewing and art studio. Many hours of hard but satisfying work still stand between me and this soothing refuge, as well as an election that threatens to destabilize the country regardless of its outcome.
I’ve half-joked about this property being a compound where my loved ones can ride out whatever comes next. But the massive hand-hewn timbers in the house have stood through one civil war – that’s enough. Our challenges cannot be resolved or avoided through self-isolation. I wish they could because I’m very good at it of late. Individualistic thinking is what got us here: dehumanized and dehumanizing, susceptible to misinformation, competing to survive in manufactured scarcity amidst abundance. I continue to doubt that the current US political system can resolve this, and I think actions at the community level are our best chance. I hope I can harness enough wonder to propel me out of the alienation and exhaustion that this system creates by design so I can take part in that redemptive work.