But It Was Worth It

By Dave Bonta, a co-founder of Rah Rah Village

May 8, 2024

It’s now  the 8th day  of May, and the memory of the Full Solar Eclipse is starting to fade. That experience is being replaced with other things. That was a whole Month ago, after all. The drive up to see it in Williston, VT was not as difficult as we’d imagined. There was a bit of stop & go. It was expected. The drive home was a lot worse. Traffic crawled. We spent hours in the car, just going maybe 5 miles per hour for most of the time. People that needed a “rest stop” pulled off to the side and tried to obscure their “nature’s call” activity by standing inside the car doors to obstruct the view. Some folks held it. Kids were getting antsy, and then unreasonable, acting like, well, children. My backside hurt, and my leg was getting cramps. Looking off to the side roads it was even a more distressing scene. It made me glad we had not risked leaving the highway for a back road; total bumper to bumper gridlock. I wondered where some of these folks were going home to. I spied license tags from Rhode Island, Connecticut and even Nevada. At this rate we knew it would be many hours of highway hell before a lot of these folks got to their beds. As the Sun, which had been the star of the show, just that afternoon, began to fade into dark night, I asked aloud: Was it worth it?  Had they known how hard of a quest it was to see this astronomical spectacle, would they have been as excited to go?  Would we have gone as well?

We finally took a chance for a back way route I knew and hoped it would clear. It was better, but we were still in a conga –line for some time. At least we were moving, and that was some solace. We got home around 11:30 PM - it had been a 7 hour plus drive. I decided to wait until morning before answering that question about if it was worth it.

The next day, I knew the answer, right away. The pain & difficulty of the travel had diminished. All that was left was the absolute joy of seeing something unbeatably spectacular. I knew it WAS worth it. I really had not prepared my brain to see what that Total Eclipse was like - how could I? If you haven’t seen it, personally, you can’t know. Partials are not the same. Photos do not do it justice. When the Sun goes into TOTAL Eclipse, the corona “pops”; a great ring of white spikes in the sky…. God’s Eye. It seemed like it lasted for a lot longer than the 4 minutes or so that it was. We could remove our special sun specs. I may never see it again - but I saw something that was… remarkable, and totally worth it.

I think that Intentional Community is a similar type of experience. It is hard on the mind and body. A lot of people think they know what it is like, but they can’t know. Just like I couldn’t know what the total eclipse was really like. Sometimes I wonder, and even aloud…Is it worth it? Is all this effort to do a community of like minded folks going to be worthwhile? Will it be for us; for anybody? Not everyone will do it. Only a few folks so far, in our “Mainstream” status Quo civilization are ready to take a bit of a risk.

The experience of the Total Ellipse that we witnessed made me realize that yeah, some things are worth it. They are worth the wait; worth the pain. If we do this right, and hang in there, through the hard part, and the long drive home, we may witness something that is just as spectacular! Something beautiful- something like the solar eclipses that even if we may not live to see again, will still be still worth witnessing for some others.