Eclipse… Saturday August 16th, 2008

e·clipse (-klps)
n.
1.
a. The partial or complete obscuring, relative to a designated observer, of one celestial body by another.
b. The period of time during which such an obscuration occurs.
2. A temporary or permanent dimming or cutting off of light.

I’m jumping across time with this one, because I’m going back to an eclipse gone-by as a result of an eclipse this very night. And because I’m a word nerd, I thought I’d throw in some definitive perspective… (probably also because I’m a nerd for definitive perspective, in those brief moments when she raises her pretty head).

I was at Sziget, that magical Hungarian island home of music festival goodness. Sziget 2008 marked my third in three years, and I can honestly tell you my desire for completing that hatrick was one of the things that got me through some challenging travel times of that year.

Much of the crew I was with that year had been before, but amongst the new faces was my friend Imogen and her daughter/my friend Cohen. Coh was something of my festival partner in crime that week, and this day we ventured in early together through the sweltering Hungarian summer heat, wandered theatre stages, chatted calming chatter, drank coffee, chilled…

Sziget is as much theatre as it is disco, as much chill-out as it is go-hard. Sziget is what you make of it. Sziget, my friends, is all things. And this year, Sziget was proving a touch tough for lil ol’ me.

b. The period of time during which such an obscuration occurs.

See, emotional pain can be as obscuring as any celestial being… if not more so, one might suggest. I found or created or encountered (or all three?!) some emotional pain on that island that year, and as is so often the case, the phases of the moon (and the buckets of long island iced tea) had a way of highlighting it…

But I was never sad this day... I was overwhelmed. I was delusional. I was reverberating with good and bad and beauty and fear. But I was never sad.

Who can be sad when there’s Vietnamese Water Puppet theatre, and the New York SKA Jazz Ensemble, and Roisin Murphy (with her honestly perfect boobs!), and Maceo Parker?!

Oh Maceo, where had you been all my life?? When did jazz hit so deep and put such a smile on my face that my cheeks hurt, such bounce in my feet that I dance til I’m dripping?!

And after Maceo’s set, in the soft enveloping black warmth of a Hungarian summer night, I literally watch the lunar eclipse above me... See the light of the moon phase away and back again above me, with the return of its rays beaming as cool and bright as the sun might warm and strong…

Tonight in Melbourne there’s another full moon and lunar eclipse. They don’t come along so often, and I nearly always find something significant goes down at that time. But tonight’s forecast for Rebecca promises to be quiet and relaxed… I wonder what she really has in store for me…