I come from a long line of moon watchers. My mother loved the moon in all its phases. When she was in an assisted living facility, her patio looked out on several vacant lots and quite a bit of sky so she still stepped out to look at the moon on clear nights. Her parents lived in a quiet residential neighborhood in Omaha. Their house was on a corner lot with a big backyard, and I recall Grandpa taking me out in that yard as a preschooler, to look at a full moon. The first thing I do upon turning the calendar to a new month is to look for the date of the full moon. So, with all that as background, it’s no wonder that the blue moon in August had us spellbound.
My granddaughter in Montana sent a phone picture of the moon which showed marvelous detail. I told her that the homeschool science lesson for that week should be astronomy, and she agreed. I was on the phone with a cousin in Washington state that evening, and she complained that they were under clouds and wouldn’t get to view the moon. As we spoke, Bruce was out in the yard taking cell phone pictures of our moonrise, so we sent those, and the ones my granddaughter took, to Pat, in Seattle.
How did you spend the evening of August 30, 2023? I hope not indoors watching the political wrangling on TV, or with your nose in a book. (Nose in a book is my default mode, but some things take precedence over that.) I hope you weren’t at a school event, or if so, that you gazed at the moon on your way home. I hope you weren’t at a party or in a bar, engrossed in whatever mundane conversation goes on in those places.
I hope you listened for cricket conversations and felt the kiss of cool evening breezes after another scorcher day. That you were aware of Ma Nature getting ready to put on her autumn garments and letting the sun sleep late of a morning. And most of all, I hope you and I, and all our companions on this planet, had a moment of insight on how small our ordinary lives are in the grand scheme of things. There’s so much sadness and strife going on in the world, so much confusion and conflict, that it’s easy to get mired down in hopelessness or anger. Individually, we don’t have a huge impact on the chaos, but we can make a difference if we take a moment to marvel at the moon, a sunset, a butterfly, or a flower that’s doing it’s best to have one last fling before winter. To be quiet, to shut off the noise, the worry, and fear of what lies ahead.
We’re living in a world that’s changing so fast it scares us. We long for simpler times, for security, for the assurance of stability. We know that everything is constantly changing, even the moon, but also that the moon changes will come again with the same regularity as always. We, who watch, can count on that when nothing else seems constant.
Meet me here next week, and meanwhile do your best. Somebody might like it.