The Bardo of Totality
My New Year's Eve journal entry upon the sunset of 2024 (edited on New Year's Day for your reading pleasure)
Garrett Kincaid | Jan 01, 2025
Dec 31, 2024, in Weehawken, NJ, at 4:27 pm:
I am writing this before the Sun sets on this year. It is one of the warmest days of December, and this morning, I sat on a bench on the Hudson River Waterfront facing New York City and read Annie Dillard's "Total Eclipse" aloud to myself. The essay was masterful and mind-bending, and it shares the emotional content that I want to carry into 2025: stillness, gratitude, reverence, mystery, and ambition — ambition for Dillard because after witnessing something that to most people is beyond words, she sat down to describe it in an essay; and ambition for me because I want to produce words of such beauty someday.
If a pair of years were an eclipse, the period between dusk on New Year's Eve and dawn on New Year's Day would be totality, a moment of debilitating ambiguity when the Sun is merely a dim ring in the sky. Maybe that's why so many people long to pass over into the New Year intoxicated: so that they don't have to contend with the bardo1 of totality, the utterly paralyzing gap between what we've known and what's to come.
For me, this was a year of learning, improving, recalibrating, a year of charting the path home. I've improved as a writer and editor; I've come into my own as a professional and am now self-employed; I've started to develop a spiritual practice via dream yoga; I've grown closer to friends and family; I've become more comfortable with who I am and can more clearly see my true nature. This entire year feels like the momentous inhalation that a hero breathes before embarking on his adventure. Although, the destination for my adventure is not somewhere out in the world; it is some inaccessibly deep part of myself. The direction for my adventure is inwards. This year has been one long inhalation, but breathing in for too long is one of the two ways to die of suffocation.
For the sake of my health and wellbeing, 2025 must be an exhale. Publish a book. Build a business. Get shredded. Socialize. Connect with Nature. I read "Total Eclipse" this morning to study the way Dillard describes the natural world and the way she infuses her stories with insights. I am reading Annie Dillard as research for the book I'm going to publish in 2025 about my adventures in Iceland and the lessons that Nature taught me there. I have spent 2024 learning what I need to do to get where I want go, but I haven't yet done enough to get there. Hence the name I have given 2025: "The Year of Devotion," during which I will pursue with a religious conviction and diligence my current best conception of my ideal self.
It is dusk now, which means that the Sun has waned to a thin crescent. This has been a year of waning — an inspiration, a pregnancy. The New Year will be one of waxing — an expiration, a birth.
I haven't yet mentioned the Moon, but that's only because She works beneath it all; She is never absent. It is the maternal forces that cause the rhythm of the world. Only the Moon has the power to obscure the Sun. Imagine the Moon swinging back and forth, eclipsing the Sun in an even rhythm as if it were a pendulum hung from beyond: the godmother clock. The Sun waning, then waxing; waning, then waxing the other way. The world inhaling, then exhaling; inhaling, then exhaling.
For a moment the heavy pendulum seems to come to rest at totality. This terrifying gap between the breath is what I require, to save me from suffocation. Submerged in mystery, suspended in emptiness, all I can do is brace myself. No! — what I must do is embrace myself. For the moment, hold. . . . Then gasp or sigh.
The second before the sun went out we saw a wall of dark shadow come speeding at us. We no sooner saw it than it was upon us, like thunder. It roared up the valley. It slammed our hill and knocked us out. It was the monstrous swift shadow cone of the moon. . . . It rolled at you across the land at 1,800 miles an hour, hauling darkness like plague behind it. . . . We saw the wall of shadow coming, and screamed before it hit. – Annie Dillard, "Total Eclipse"
Springboard
A carefully crafted question to help you dive inwards:
Footnotes
- Bardo is a Tibetan word literally meaning "intermediate state"; "the state of in-between where you gather energy until life can be resumed" (reference: The Wisdom Library). This term generally refers to any metaphorical "gap" and is most often used in Buddhism to reference the space/time after death and before rebirth, as in the Bardo Thodol, A.K.A. The Tibetan Book of the Dead. ↑