NIGHT-BLOOMING CEREUS

A busy moth led me to a night-blooming cereus 

lit by moonlight behind a low lava wall.

My cousin said the fragrant pānini-o-ka-punahou

blooms but once a year, and dies at dawn.

I leaned in to taste the intoxicating odor,

but it let go of its mooring and fell to the ground,

a fallen star or perhaps an angel. So I saved it,

and wore it in my hair the next morning, 

to witness the full eclipse of the sun, 
at Puʻuhonua o Hōnaunau, the place of refuge.

We watched the black sun become a vast flower 

surrounded by stars and solar winds as the birds 

and fishes slept in during that second false dawn.

Seeking asylum, I let the blossom go in the coral sea 

to dream among the honu turtles and seastars.

11/11/22

NIGHT BLOOMING CEREUS

During the total eclipse on the Big Island, 

I found a night-blooming cereus blossom, 

but because morning was an extended night, 

it stayed open all throughout the day, 

it didn't wilt, so I wore it in my hair, 

the fragile blossom was the size of a saucer, 

and the narcotic scent was heavenly. 

I let it drift in the sea with the maninni,

small fish that circled me like a swirl of fall leaves.

Then I let it go on the tide.

Annular Eclipse, May 20, 2012

When I was young, I remember watching an eclipse in the schoolyard at Lagunitas School with the naked eye. But then, we also watched the skyline when they set off an atomic bomb at Jackass Flats, NV.

I can still see fine (maybe little auras here and there) but I've no idea what damage it caused. But then, I'm also long past the crossroads of denial that I need reading glasses.

During the 1990s, I got more sophistocated and used stacks of UV sunglasses for filters and even a stint with mylar anti-static hard drive bags (see my 2009 post).

Someone took a photo of me wearing funny mylar eclipse glasses for the total Hawaiian eclipse in 1991. I actually bought a square of mylar for my camera too—for $20. Number 14 welding glasses were not a practical option.

But simple pinhole cameras are the safest and easiest way to view an eclipse. A cylindrical Quaker cardboard oatmeal mush box is the easiest to make. Punch a hole at the bottom end with a pencil at one end, and use the lid to project the light.

Your lens aperture—the width of a pencil seems to work fine—but you can use other objects to create lens size. The smoother the hole, like with a knitting needle, the crisper the edge. But you don't need a perfect lens to view the eclipse.

No oatmeal box? A paperback book cover will work. Punch a hole in the middle, use other cover underneath to focus it. Pulp fiction never looked so good.

Your crossed fingers will make eclipses. A colander works fine too. The holes are just the right size. Even those reading glasses will project an image onto paper—and quite possibly start a fire.

I'm sure the ancients discovered that trees also make great spontaneous pinhole cameras—especially long-needled eucaluptus. Oak trees too. The dappled light between the leaves will make images of myriad eclipses on the ground. You just have to know what you're looking at. And how to bring it into focus.

You can use cardboard or paper to "focus" the parallax position of the image. Move it up and down between ground and tree leaves to focus it until you find the sweet spot.

How I know this: In 1979, I was in my kitchen in Cotati, and I noticed strange crescents crawling on the wall in the shadow of my hanging plant—a succulent.

At first I thought they were ants or an outburst of spiders and tried to swat them away and then I thought I was having a really weird flashback or completely losing my mind as I had no idea there was an eclipse happening.

I put two and two (or sun and moon) together and ran outside, camera in hand—but the wall was more interesting. I scurried all over the yard tracking little myriad eclipse shadows. The photos weren't all that interesting but I was thrilled beyond belief by my "new" discovery.


Enjoy today's eclipse but safeguard your eyes. They're the only ones you got. And check the local time. Not Mountain Time like I did in 2009 when I was madly staring into the midday sun an hour after the eclipse had come and gone.

Further reading: I delved indepth on the process of chasing eclipses in another post: Partial Eclipse, 7/21/2009. I even invoked Sir Isaac Newton's "Opticks."

ScienceCasts: Solar Eclipse in the USA 


How to make a pinhole camera from the Exploratorium.

Timeline via The Daily Mail. It'll pass over Reno & Redding at 5:12 to 5:15 PM. The full annular eclipse will last about 5 minutes. The rest of us will see a partial eclipse. I've never seen an annular eclipse and unfortunately I'll be at work today...so I don't hold much hope of glimpsing it on paper, or otherwise.


NB: as it turned out, my "lunch" break was during the height of the eclipse and many of my coworkers abandoned ship for the parking lot. So I was able to get many photos of shadows. 


Interesting, the shadows were all blurry as the light was coming from two different sources/directions—the moon split the light. Also, as the sun went into the eclipse, the wind picked up, like during the total eclipse in Hawaii. Then it died completely during totality. The birds definitely went to sleep early, so it was eerily quiet, and our skin was cold to the touch as there was very little heat coming from the sun. 


I had several blurred people photos, not realizing that though there was plenty of light for the eye to see, the camera was not fooled. I didn't realize this until I uploaded the jpgs and then noticed in the images that all the parking light and the security night lights were on—at 6 PM!

FIREDANCE

UMBRA, CITY OF REFUGE, HAWAII, 7/11/91

On Achieving Totality

Annular Eclipse

Partial Eclipse, 7/21/2009

ON ACHIEVING TOTALITY

The last total eclipse I witnessed

was July 11, 1991, on the Big Island,

in the City of Refuge, from the heiau

of Pu`uhonua o Honaunau.

It was devastatingly awesome

that morning, a total eclipse of the sun.

People cheered, wept, hugged strangers,

got married on the beach in feather cloaks,

took another toke, and passed it on.

It was either a day of bad omens

or for unbelievably good luck. Twice blessed.

Who could choose? Totality had been achieved.

The sun turned into a diamond ring

in a double dawn dressed in adamantine skies.

In Keoneʻele Cove, where Hawai'ian royalty bathed—

to swim there was a crime, punishable by death—

I drifted with green sea turtles the size of boogieboards.

In a restless sea rising to the gravitational pull

of both sun and moon harnessed in unison,

a second darkness descended like an obsidian knife,

the dawn birds and fish all fell back to sleep.

Like clouds of bright fallen leaves at my feet,

schools of manini—striped convict tang—

caught red-handed in suspended animation,

were imprisoned by tide out of time.

The day before, I saw molten lava plunge into the sea,

and I stepped on newly minted earth.

My hiking boots melted, the surf belched acid rain,

but red-hot lava exploding in the waves

& the sun turn into a dark eye in a morning sky

were both equally an experience of a lifetime.

Between both days, I could not choose one,

I was Solomon’s child divided between two mothers.
My eyes had been twice burned by the birth of beauty.
And that vision had made me sandblind to the ordinary.

The apogee of my understanding of beauty, obsolete.

Basking in the sea

Vito says you can’t bask in the sea. Shiva says But you can bask in the sun, but I am thinking of floating in a warm sea, basking, floating, with no destination in mind. Surely the creatures of the sea can bask? What about the basking shark? I have seen turtles basking on the surface of the sea, with no destination. They were more than just floating, they were basking. Once, during the total eclipse, I sea turtle startled me and I nearly drowned with excitement as he swim beneath me. He was huge, like a sled or a boogie board and all morning I followed him around that bay as the sun in the moon wrestled in the sky between light and dark. It was a free time where all bets were off even in the natural world. We were out of time as tide and wind were in stasis. I followed that turtle ballet until I was so far out to sea, all alone. But when the sun returned as Maui the sun god pulled the moon's face from the sun's…. But not before I saw the diamond ring and the penumbra. Meanwhile a couple exchanged wedding vows and let their leis loose in the sea. Puuonuaohonaunau, the place of refuge. That turtle pulled me far out to see like a siren. That day I had no fear of drowning though drowning was at hand.

2/24//2006 Writers' Group

House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad

House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad
by Madelon Sprengnether (Author) , C.W. Truesdale (Editor)

Amazon 2nd ed. listing, has my name, but no link

I had NO idea that it even went into a 2nd edition in 1997, and a 3rd printing!
Well, I guess have a first edition, then.

My story Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace, was picked up by Black Dog & Leventhal (Workman) in 2001. Writing the Rails: Train Adventures By the World's Best-Loved Writers  by Edward C. Goodman (Author). Alas, it was remaindered right after it came out, right before 9/11. I never did get to do an author reading at Barnes & Noble. I will publish more info on this in 2001 entry. 

Night Train to Moscow: Waging Peace / Maureen Hurley p. 179

I do not have an electronic facsimile of my story. Only way to get it is to scan pages, but I've no OCR software. I may scan pages direct.  —MH, 2014

House On Via Gombito: Writing by North American Women Abroad

From Publishers Weekly:
The nearly 50 short pieces of travel writing that comprise this volume display such a wealth of perspectives and explore such a variety of locales that the book is a splendid adventure in its own right. In "Ramont Hall" Rhiannon Paine looks back to 1973 when, at the age of 25, armed with a broken umbrella, a "dilapidating Mini" and youthful enthusiasm, she set out to see England. Helen Degen Cohen, who, as an eight-year-old Jewish girl narrowly escaped being deported to a concentration camp, describes her "Return to Warsaw" to visit the Catholic woman who hid her during World War II. Patricia Hampl's "Italian Two-Part Invention" savors the romance of a damp Venetian winter; a visit to a monastery during one sunny Umbrian spring triggers a memory of the author's childhood. Melissa Sanders-Self's fictional "Nameless Things" follows the daily grind of a young American woman who serves drinks in a Tokyo club that caters to Japanese businessmen. Catherine Stearns's "Icarus in Africa" is a series of letters from a feisty woman who signs herself "Ma" and who, at 60, starts out to teach at a rural school in Zambia. Sprengnether wrote Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreamsone title and Truesdale is publisher of New Rivers.

Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Madeline Sprengnether

UMBRA, CITY OF REFUGE, HAWAII, 7/11/91

UMBRA, CITY OF REFUGE, HAWAII,  7/11/91

.
The
Moon bites
the   Sun's  lips.
A circle of darkness:
the umbra descends like a

tent across the barrier of clouds
as if companion light was trapped

deep in the arms of summer, remembering
the past as blue as dreams of fish wanting to

be water, becoming water.  The birds, just finished

with the morning song, begin a hurried evening chorus.

Dawn winds reverse directions. When Perseus threw Med-

usa's shining head into the sea, the algae turned to coral. We

look directly at the sun, and we are not turned to stone.  A chil-


led, primeval silence: stars surround the corona. It's a sun flowering

      iii
        eyeyeye
with serpents of light; a vast  e y e,  a hole opening into the universe.
        eyeyeye
      !!!

But if the moon is moving away from the earth, total solar eclipses


are doomed to extinction.  Between the silhouetted moon's mount-

ains— solar flares, Bailey's beads, & the dazzling diamond ring.

The ocean winds & perplexed birds prepare once again for dawn.

A wild cheer is raised across the island for the prodigal sun.

We clap, cry & rejoice. A couple exchanges wedding vows.

The end of totality,  I break tapu by casting a common-
er's shadow in the City of Refuge, and leave my pik-

ake lei on the stone altar to appease the old gods
but the Ailii are asleep; the sea turtle glides,

a raptor over the sleeping coral. Ris-
ing tides pull at me,  a shim-
mering storm, wanting
to be  air, becom-
ing air.


3/5/92

1992 Chaminade Literary Review

this isn't going to work on Blogger, shape will be lost

Solar eclipse, totality, Big Island (photos)

Solar eclipse, totality, Big Island. Since I couldn't look through my camera, I was shooting blind, and apparently I was a bit unsteady, as well. It was a long handheld shot, as there was so little light.

Hawaii Journal, 7/11/91, total eclipse of the sun