Those are the words of a 51-year-old Australian psychologist named Kate Russo.  BBC.com caught up with her as she was traveling to Uvalde, Texas to experience her 14^th total eclipse of the sun.  14.  Isn’t that a little excessive?  I mean, it’s interesting and all that… maybe even wondrous… but 14?  Kate has maybe gotten things out of perspective.

And yet, she has clocked fewer sightings of an eclipse than David Makepeace, 61, of Toronto, who last week watched his 19th.  (They have long winters up there.  What else is there to do?)  But when it comes to chasing eclipses, both Russo and Makepeace are rank amateurs when you compare them to the granddaddy of star-gazers.  So, please rise for Paul Maley, a 76-year-old retired data analyst and flight control specialist at NASA for 41 years.  Last week Paul witnessed his 83rd eclipse since 1970 – including annular, partial, and total solar eclipses – across 42 countries.

If you think that Russo, Makepeace, and Maley sound kinda addicted, then you’re not alone.  Maley himself admits “Once you get to see something that is this unique, you want more of it,” he said.  The experience evokes existential questions for him: “How could we possibly live in a solar system that is that beautiful? That has that much of an emotional punch to it?  How could that possibly be?”

I was both inspired and saddened when I read that article on BBC.com.  Inspired because in this cynical, nihilistic Western world where people try to find meaning in such dead-end messiahs like politics, technology, and money, there are still legions of people who are open to being moved beyond their physical circumstances – to wonder and dream and acknowledge that there has to be more to life.

And I was saddened because it took a literal cosmic phenomenon to bring them to this point of wonder.  Further, I want to know how the eclipse-chasers’ stories end.  Russo, Makepeace, and Maley may sound like a law firm, but I am keen to know what happens next in their pursuit of the Great Lawgiver.

What now?  Will these miracle-seekers look beyond the stars to the God who created them?  Will they wonder at the weird intricacies of a complex and beautiful universe and spot the unfathomable mind that dreamed them up?  And then will they look deeper, chase harder, and gaze longer until they see the great heart that so bursts with love for them that the great mind became a human being?

Well, I can’t answer that, I can only dream and hope.  And there’s one other thing I can do.  I can guard my heart against the anxiety-creating hopelessness of our age, and train myself to see the wondrous in my daily life and the God who is behind it all.