Phenomenal: A Hesitant Adventurer's Search for Wonder in the Natural World by Leigh Ann Henion Page A

forms before our eyes. It’s a fairly rare, reflective ice-crystal phenomenon that’s traditionally thought to be an indicator of bad weather. As the bands expand, it appears that the moon is blowing rainbow-tinted smoke rings. Alan is appreciative of the sighting, but he’s not surprised. Stuff like this is always happening out here.
    It was in this exact spot that he witnessed the 1998 solar eclipse. He says, “A phenomenon like that makes you feel strange. It makes animals go nuts. I met these eclipse hunters once and they told me that an eclipse is the oldest recorded event on earth.” As the story goes, there were two armies on their way to war when, suddenly, the sun disappeared. “They thought it was a sign from the gods,” Alan says. They were awed into peace.
    “It was 400 BC; they can tell when it happened down to the second because of the cosmos. That’s the reason life exists, because the cosmos are so perfect. If the sun changed its temperature even a little, we’d be toast.” Alan leans forward in his chair. “It’s that sort of thing that can make you believe in God.”
    Alan turns to look at me, breaking his sky gaze for the first time in a long while, and he says, “I feel really privileged to exist. I don’t understand how or why I’m here. It’s not like when I’m talking about my body; I’m talking about my soul. I believe we are something more than expression of self.”
    This transcendence of self—ego—is what many religious traditions are about. It’s a major tenet of Buddhism, the religion Einstein thought was perhaps best suited of all organized religions to serve science, which tends to value the body of work created over time more than the insights of an individual. There’s really little room for ego in the long arch of discovery. No matter how far one ventures in a lifetime, how much knowledge or insight is gained, there’s always more to be known.
    Einstein felt there were three sorts of religiosity. The first two were the religions of morals and fear; the third he called “cosmic religious feeling.” He understood this state to be one that had no dogma and no God conceived in man’s image, a way of thinking that allowed for failure and encouraged the sort of curious doggedness required of scientists and creative people. It was spirituality that transcended understanding, an embracement of mystery and the impulse to explore it. “In my view,” he wrote, “it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.”
    Some people, it seems to me, attempt to fall away from their egos, to transcend into cosmic religiosity, via yoga or meditation. Others, like Alan—and, I’m increasingly realizing, myself—are seeking the same sort of experience in nature at its most spectacular, in moments that inspire a sort of temporary yielding of fear and expectation to awe and acceptance.
    A sense of wonder is, I think, what Einstein meant by a cosmic religious feeling. And that is really what I’m seeking on this journey. It’s an admission of human frailty and the perfect magnificence of earth, the universe, time, in a way that removes the masks of humankind’s many religions to reveal their connectivity, the fact that we are—in the end—one.
     • • • 
    Romo is the first to awaken when the lightning begins a few hours later. He greets everyone on the porch with a lightbulb-shaped lantern balanced over his head, symbolizing a moment of enlightenment
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“
¡Tengo una idea!
” Romo says. “I have an idea!” The jokester, still wearing his bikini underwear and nothing else, starts to giggle.
    He’s the opening act. We’re in for quite a show.
    The clouds are lighting up the sky like giant rice-paper lanterns, strikes hidden in the clouds. These obscured flashes are known as sheet lightning. The absence of thunder makes these appear as what many people—including me—have long called heat