The eclipse brought us together. We can’t wait 20 years to feel that way again.

LAKE WAPPAPELLO, MO. — Before I was shaken awake by darkness, I was just one of a swarm, a crowd of humans walking down a hill from the parking lot to the lake’s edge. We had driven for hours through the rural wilderness to get here, past fields growing crops I cannot name and through roads so remote they don’t have names, just letters of the alphabet. The traffic thickened near the state park’s gate.

The procession to the path of totality felt like the tailgate before a big game. People had wagons full of drinks and barbecue supplies. Folding chairs and picnic blankets abounded. Some had brought colanders from their kitchens to see the sun with chunks taken out of it by the moon. Others had elaborate camera lenses and tripods. I brought an orange, two bottles of water, a Frisbee, my notebook, eclipse glasses, and a desire to experience whatever show the sun and moon and planets would provide.

At first, the crowd was tentative. We kept our distance, pods of families and friends strewed on blankets and towels. But then, in line for the porta potty, I started talking with a dad from Washington state who had driven to Missouri for the eclipse, stopping to visit his daughter in Denver on the way. This wasn’t his first time; the copious supplies in his backpack showed that he knew what he was doing.

We settled beside the lake and started to throw the Frisbee for the dog, waiting. A family next to us played volleyball. It was delicious to be gathered with strangers for nothing other than the simple reason of being in awe of the sky. That kind of unity is hard to replicate.

In the hours of waiting, I started talking to others assembled in the crowd. Kendra and Peter from Iowa had an elaborate folding rocking chair and looked so completely at ease next to each other, not tearing their gaze from the sky. A whole family from Wisconsin, three generations, including an infant, were replicating the colander trick with a piece of paper that had been hole-punched and cast shadows on their blanket. A grandmother from Alabama had driven her grandkids here just to see an eclipse together in her lifetime.

Everything was beginning to feel so normal that the hurtling plunge of totality was akin to a slap. And for those four weightless minutes, we were transported into a different world.

It was so dark, darker than I could believe.

A sudden coldness in the air on my skin made me stand up straighter. The wind kicked up and blew my hair back. The shadow of the moon was over us as colors faded to gold and gray. We could see the biggest corona, a ring of light, irregular, strong, tendriled, dancing outward from the black hole where the sun used to be. And the sun felt larger than it ever has; I could almost reach out and touch the flares.

I started to holler, unable to control the noises coming from my mouth. Time turned on its head. I cried and I danced barefoot in the grass. I shouted and whooped and spun.

Annie Dillard, in her essay about the 1979 eclipse in Washington state, perhaps says it best: “Seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him, or as flying in an airplane does to falling out of an airplane. Although the one experience precedes the other, it in no way prepares you for it.”

I wasn’t ready. There was no way to be. Seeing a total eclipse is not some flight of astrological fancy, but instead a life-changing experience, one that emphasizes how united we are on the surface of this planet we call home.

In a time of disunity, after perilous elections and a global pandemic, it’s a message of togetherness our country needs now more than ever.

Yes, there were Trump signs in the Missouri farming towns I had driven through, but out by the lake, politics didn’t matter. We were gathered to participate in an intricately choreographed togetherness, one contingent on a precise alignment of our hurtling through outer space. What would it take, I wonder, to replicate that feeling without the confluence of the sun and moon?

It’s abnormal to feel one’s smallness in this world — combined with a deep well of interconnectedness with another and the entire cosmos. I am merely human. I get caught up in my own heartbreaks, my own pains, failure, the mundane stuff of living. The sun rises and the sun sets. I am used to the predictable rhythm of living.

Yet in those minutes of totality, darkness in the bright afternoon, I hugged a stranger. I hugged my dog. I felt completely outside of myself, as if I was seeing my body from above, whirling, luminous — and how wonderful does that feel? I was one with the sun and the moon and the lake and the hundreds of people around me, all of us focused on one point of massive black in the middle of a ring of light. And I could see other planets laid out in the sky, too: a three-dimensional model of what it looks like to peer into the solar system. Someone next to me shouted that it was Venus. And was that Saturn, too?

When the lights turned back on, totality over, I felt deflated, like when the overhead brights turn on at the end of a dance party that I never wanted to end. Last call. The planets were gone. I kept the eclipse glasses on my eyes, hoping to recapture some of that feeling, the improbability of all of it. But like all joys, it ended. Nothing gold can stay. The sun returned to its normal brightness and we drove away, part of a procession back to our respective states, wondering: Did this all really happen? And how could we ever be the same?

That circle of darkness is seared in my memory now. I want more. I understand why a crazed group of explorers travels the world chasing eclipses. Totality is a rush that my body is still making sense of, and that I won’t soon forget.

But what will stand out from those precious moments at Lake Wappapello State Park in Missouri is not the corona of the sun — magnificent as it was — nor the small bites of light that the moon took out of our nearest star for the hours before and after, ravenous. Instead, it’s the community that formed around a shared experience.

Liv from Colorado, adjacent to us, offered the biggest hug in the darkness and said: “Isn’t it beautiful?”

In her embrace and in her question, I realized that I needed to have that beauty magnified back at me. We needed to reassure each other that the eclipse was real. As if to say: Did you see that? Did you know that the wild miracle of being alive in this moment together is just, for lack of a better word, divine?

In this moment — a fraught election year, wars raging abroad, democracy at stake — fear is more accessible than love. It’s easy to be afraid of one another. Cultivating trust with strangers is another challenge entirely. It’s much, much easier to turn away from the hard work of seeing one another.

Yet as I continue to make sense of the minutes I felt outside of myself under a darkened sky, I have to ask: What will it take to keep this feeling alive? To know, truly, that our neighbors are just like ourselves?

America needs more eclipses. Unfortunately, the next one on the continental U.S. isn’t until 2044.

An alignment of the earth and the sun and the moon can jolt us into a shared reality. But we can get there another way — by learning a different way of seeing: one that prioritizes shared experiences over sterile pandemic bubbles, the great expanse of the sky over the smallness of screens, and generosity over all else.

That kind of beloved community is always available, just behind the curtain of light.