I had no expectations for the total eclipse or even much enthusiasm leading up to the event, to be honest. But on that day, something shifted for me, creatively speaking. A new idea for a novel appeared, shimmering and dreamlike, and I began writing immediately, joyfully. I’ve worked on that project every day since society’s brief collective-interest in astronomy; that work, my dog, and writing angry LTEs about terrible people are getting me through the dark days of watching police storm student protests with weapons of war.

Before I began this new novel, I was stuck both creatively and emotionally. I have a novel on submission, and the wait has been excruciating and distracting. In low moments, I tried to convince myself it would be okay if I never published another book, while refreshing my inbox too many times a day, hoping for publishing news of any kind. Even a rejection makes me happy, because it means someone has read my manuscript, engaged with my work, and made a decision about it. I was sinking too much energy into waiting and worrying, not into writing.

I had completed most of another novel before the manuscript went out on submission, but I was at a standstill with that one; I haven’t been able to craft the right ending, and a few plot holes need filling. The themes of both the novel-in-progress and the novel-on-submission are similar—creative ambition, the legacy of English colonialism—and in my head they feel reliant on one another. It became impossible to work on the newer one without worrying about the fate of the other.

I won’t say what the lunar project is about; some secrets are their own creative engines. But I will say it’s reaffirmed for me the essential and nurturing place art has in my daily life. If I am making something I love, I am more functional, more hopeful, more present with the people in my life. Not checking my email every five minutes or doom-scrolling for signs of the apocalypse.

During a class I taught after the eclipse, students showed me the photographs they took of the event. My own cell phone images are blurry and underwhelming, but theirs were glorious: sharp and radiant; they revealed the glowing marriage of moon and sun we’d witnessed as a community. The pictures also captured a process and energy that is at once deeply mysterious and wonderfully familiar.

The two things I can count on in this life are that one day I will die and that before too long I will feel like creative garbage again. While I can’t depend on another celestial event to clear things up for me artistically, I can certainly try to recall the afterimage of the moon in front of the sun, the suddenly cold air on my body, the anticipation that something beautiful is going to happen next, very soon, when I least expect it.