We all look up.

I lay down on the grass at the park. I was far from alone. There was my husband. There were my students. There were strangers. We were all together in the park, looking up at a cloudy sky, waiting and hoping.

Down the street other people did the same. On campus my son was on a rooftop. Friends across the country friends posted pictures of their skies. All long the path of the sun, hundreds, thousands, millions of people looked up.

Sure, groups of people doing the same thing can be…off-putting. Think of cults and holiday shoppers run amok and conspiracy rabbit holes

But sometimes groups of people doing the same thing create magic. Think of choirs and chorus lines and writing groups.

And sometimes groups aren’t making anything, no trouble, no work of art. Instead, they’re sharing wonder at the sun and the moon and the few minutes they align. The day becomes night and to look at the alignment directly can ruin vision. We are so small in the vastness of the universe. The sun is 93 million miles away, 93 million miles, and it gives, shines, or even blinds.

As bright as it looks in the sky, when you put on those eclipse glasses, you see the sun looks like a tiny thing. It’s almost a cookie and a dragon has come for it.

Watching an eclipse in the city, we’re not that far from people long ago amazed at what was happening above. We might know more about the sun–we wear protective glasses–and the moon–for heaven’s sake, we’ve been there!–but we still stand on this same little blue dot and look up.

And what we see is beautiful.