Lāhainā Noon

On a white sandy beach, a pregnant woman pauses. For a moment she feels a sudden lightness, almost as though she’s floating half an inch off the ground. She becomes strangely aware of all the lives that have gone before her, and all those still to come. She glances down.

Her shadow has gone.

I first came across this image while reading entries for a haiku competition recently. The image was so striking, and the phrase used so unfamiliar, that I had to know more. Far from explaining the poem away, understanding the phrase only deepened the power of the poetry.

The phrase was Lāhainā Noon.

It's a Hawaiian name, but by no means a uniquely Hawaiian experience. Everywhere between the Tropics experiences this curious phenomenon twice each year as the Sun passes directly overhead. For a few fleeting moments, upright objects cast almost no shadow at all. Astronomers call it the Sun’s zenith passage. It happens somewhere on Earth every single day.

The name Lāhainā Noon itself is surprisingly recent, coined in 1990. Hawaiian, though, has a much older phrase for noon itself.

kau ka lā i ka lolo

The sun rests upon the brain.

Astronomy tells us what’s happening. The Hawaiian phrase tells us what it feels like.

The ancient Maya noticed these shadowless noons too, using them to mark agriculture, ceremony and the passing of time. The zenith and nadir passages of the Sun formed a vertical connection between the Upper World above and the Underworld below. For a few moments each year, heaven and earth seemed briefly connected.

The Sun has always done this. What changed was that somebody noticed, and thought the moment worth remembering.

That’s the interesting part of the whole thing, for me.

We seem drawn to moments when one thing becomes another. Dawn and dusk. Birthdays. Weddings. Midnight on New Year’s Eve. The recent popularity of the word liminal hints at the same instinct. None of these moments lasts long, yet we instinctively mark the instant when the world becomes ever so slightly different.

So do words. They don’t only preserve meanings. They are the traces of somebody noticing something for the first time, leaving us with ways of seeing that we might otherwise have missed.

And because they did, a pregnant woman can stand beneath the midday Sun, look down at the missing shadow by her feet, and notice it too. One day she might tell her child about that strange, otherworldly moment at Lāhainā Noon.

And so it continues.

- the word collector, behind the counter