Other states, other lives, other souls

In early March I read that April 8^th, 2024, would be the date of a special kind of solar eclipse. As happens these days with a 24/7 news cycle, scads of news stories hyped the big event to attract readers. The build-up to this unusually rare astronomical event grabbed my attention. My husband’s birthday is April 5, an important time to have been born at this day and year, so off we went in search of adventure.

I do not remember the keywords I used on Google’s (“Don’t be evil) search engine, but an event in Dripping Springs, Texas, caught my eye. In March of 2020, we had set out on our usual spring southwest road trip. The plan was to head to Texas, stop to camp in Dripping Springs—just west of Austin—and head south to Brownsville for a week of volunteering to greet and assist immigrants awaiting permission to enter the US as asylum seekers. A colleague of mine, who used to head up a refugee torture treatment program in Dallas, spent several years working with refugees at the Brownsville-Mexico border in Matamoros.  The volunteers impressed me, providing resource information to the adults, crossing the border in buses, while other volunteers set up schools for children awaiting processing and living in perilous tent cities across the border. Previously, I had organized a few neighbors in my townhouse community to send books to these refugee children. Then, upon returning to Austin on April 3, I had booked tickets to see the Drive By Truckers at the historic Scoots Inn. The trip was cut short just shy of Dripping Springs when our son sent an ominous text warning that “they” were about to lockdown the country.  We turned around and went back home.  I started making masks from leftover sewing fabrics and washing my hands for 20 seconds each time.

What Dripping Springs offered now was not just a rural viewing spot, but a full-on 3-day New Age Symposium, entitled Total Eclipse of the Heart. I invited my Brooklyn sister and her friend Elise to join us. They did, wending their way to Dripping Springs via rental car after a flight to New Orleans. This Symposium group also viewed the 2024 eclipse as an even rarer event than the space nerds, from an astrological viewpoint. Since my husband was born under the sign of Aries, this event promised to be especially meaningful to him.  The Symposium offered two days of short Ted-talk like lectures with mystical titles such as “What happens when the Sleeping Phoenix Awakens in 2027?”, “Neuroscience and Cosmic Grids: from Picometers to Infinity, a Hermetic Perspective”, and “Accelerated Ascension through Past Life Healing.” Heady stuff!

We tent camped for four days on the grounds of a ranch turned wedding venue. Luckily, the number of people signed up for this possibly apocalyptic event stayed under 75 people, so it was a nice group to hang out with.  We are old enough that the Age of Aquarius had already been awaited once before in our 20s. Not so, this younger crowd. 

The April 8^th eclipse did not produce the “Overview Effect” our little group might have hoped. The clear blue skies of previous days had given way to partial dark, moving clouds.  We could see at times the totality, but not for the extended, uninterrupted viewing time expected.  The sky darkened to night, the birds stopped vocalizing, and the chanting kept us in a meditative frame of mind.

We said good-bye to our Brooklyn friends on Monday afternoon. We broke camp the next day and drove north with our mountain bikes to Moab, Utah, to meet up with friends from Missoula. On April 14^th we headed home. 

The title of this travel post ricochets back in time from the final leg of our road trip from Moab, Utah. The Moab leg of the road trip was to bike or hike in Arches National Park and Dead Horse Point State Park. During the next two days of sharing stories and having lots of laughs, our friends recommended listening to the Audible version of the book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, by Jon Krakauer, on our way home. Since we were in southern Utah, an area that has been home to many fundamentalist Mormon sects who still practice plural wives (polygamy), it seemed an apt choice. 

Thus, we were immersed for two weeks in two American subcultures whose views of the world and its future are like each other in methodology but very different in their conclusions about reality and humans’ purpose.  Both are not reason-based, but instead are mystically intuited.  The fundamentalist Mormons’ faith is derived from direct input from their God and from original writings of their founding fathers in the early 19th Century.  The “evolutionary astrologers” and other new age gurus intuit the future from the stars and other mystical writings.  According to Krakauer’s investigative story of the Lafferty family, the former used their faith-based sources to justify murder, exclude women from any role in leadership, exploit children, and openly promote the superiority of the White race. The New Agers are eagerly awaiting a more loving earthly existence as foretold by the stars.  Women play an equal role with men in leading and promoting this hopeful message.  Multicultural knowledge is valued. 

I have been a democratic socialist secular humanist since my early 20s. My father was a Republican atheist, from a mainstream Protestant family. Neither of us came to our beliefs from mystical or faith-based methodologies. Yet, we also came to different conclusions about how humans should be governed and live, based on our knowledge of human history, the value we put on rational thinking, and the experiences we had in community at different time periods.

I believe we could debate each other’s points of view (which we did often), without resorting to violence, and believing that the other might modify those views through debate or new experiences.  How does one debate with a fundamentalist Mormon?  How  would we debate the New Agers’ beliefs in the portents in the stars?  In the case of the religious fundamentalists, change occurs when some of the members who have suffered oppression under the authoritarian and misogynist systems escape and testify about how they suffered. In the case of the New Agers, the failure of their benevolent predictions to come true, time and time again, has resulted in a loss of faith for some, as it did in the 1970s, or a continuing search for spiritual guidance. 

In the meantime, those of us who eschew faith-based beliefs have a duty to continue to try to make the world a better place for all with only human intelligence and commonly shared values for guidance. It turns out that May 4^th 2024, is National Day of Reason, an inclusionary celebration of humanist values and the scientific method.  I hope the reader will consider celebrating it too.