Dragon swallows sun

It was a day just like any other day...
Actually it wasn't and I can't make the opening to my paragraph like this, not even for dramatic license. This day was different because everyone had been expecting it and knew when it was coming and what was coming. 'It' being the solar eclipse and here from Tokyo we would be able to see a partial one. Anyone who could obtain access to our most southerly islands of Iwo Jima would have had a complete and perfect view but for the rest of us, we suffered the cloudy skies that covered Eastern Asia and the Pacific Ocean.
Work was being done and life passed just as it would on any other day but always there was the background chatter about stories of old and myths associated with eclipses creeping into everyday conversation. You would think that in our modern world today we have grown past such superstitions but I can tell you that any pregnant lady scheduled to be induced or scheduled for a caesarean delivery on this ominous and foreboding day would have postponed it and any lady about to go into labor would be begging for intravenous magnesium sulphate to delay it. These myths cross religious and cultural boundaries and have no basis in science - it's just simple people with a fear of an unnatural darkness and they see this as an omen of ill fortune.

Just before 11:15am people started moving away from desks and staked a place near a window. Some even went up to the roof. I jumped in an elevator with a couple of work colleagues and hit the ground floor button, I wanted to taste the air and not see it with my face stuck to a glass window. The first ill fortune stuck between floors three and four when the lift stopped. We just looked at each other with a little nervousness but before anyone decided to hit the alarm button we started moving again. We walked outside into a normal day, people were going about their normal routines but many were glancing upwards. The traffic moved past us at a leisurely pace and the background noise of the city sang softly in our ears. It was a cloudy sky but we could occasionally see the disc of the sun as the cloud sometimes thinned in its passing across our unfinished sky.
Then it began. A few people pointed upwards and as we too looked and saw on the rare moments the cloud thinned, we could see a little part of the disc missing. Four or five of us shared two eclipse glasses that make it safe to look up at the sun momentarily. From this far north of the "totality corridor", we saw 75% of totality.
The skies grew dark and gray and a strange quietness descended about us as if we were enveloped within some fog that not only restricted sight but also sound and movement and temperature. Eerie is perhaps the best word I can think of as there was an uneasy sense of cool stillness in this half-light. Looking up it seemed as if what remained of the sun was actually smiling down at all of us below with our unreasonable and superstitious feelings of woe and despair. "Oh please bring back the sun, we need it!" Lots of people actually applauded it as if the heavens were putting on some grand performance just for us. Maybe it does? I find it amazing that the distance of the moon makes her disc appear the same size as that of the sun with her distance. The moon is actually receding from the Earth and in a few million years we won't have such an effect when the moon crosses in front of the sun. When the first dinosaurs walked the Earth, the closer moon would have covered the disc of the sun quite easily on the eclipses that they witnessed.

Back to today's world and the gray gradually faded and the contrast and saturation of the living and colorful world grew back as if the Earth was once more restored from momentarily crossing the border into limbo. The people and traffic moved again into reality and the urban song renewed itself after such a grand pause.
I include NHK Video taken from Iwo Jima (sorry it's in Japanese) but you can see and feel the emotion.

O Fortune, just as the moon
stands constantly changing,
always increasing or decreasing.
Detestable life now difficult and then easy,
deceptive sharp mind, poverty, power
careless on ice.

In response to a question I received in my email. C from USA asks do I use Photoshop for some of my images.
Answer: Yes I do. Sometimes I add color or contrast, brighten or darken or even change color of something. Sometimes I remove people that were standing behind me and I may change a background to conceal something that I don't want seen. I may also use the wealth of special effects that Photoshop has but the cartoon images that you see in the last post and this one were created by uploading photos to this site. On my own blog I feel free to manipulate images as much as I do words. I hope that answers your inquiry.