Spring Anniversary Moon
Been thinking about predators, mountain lions in particular. About how difficult and demanding their life is: hunting for a next meal, finding prey that moves, that can fight back. Consider the plant eaters and how they thrive. Wandering over to the meadow, to the willow, to the shrub, scraping in the soil for roots. I admire the predator, the lonely vigilance their life requires, but to live like that? No thanks. I prefer grocery stores.
Here’s an amazing photograph taken by a Japanese space probe circling the moon.
And another one by Cassini.
Yet it is not a true analog. Mother earth only seems to defy winter and the fallow time. It is not, in fact, death and resurrection, but a continuum of growth, slowed in the cold, yes, but not stopped forever, then magically restarted. Corms, bulbs, tubers and rhizomes all store energy from the previous growing season and wait only for the right temperature changes to release it. Seeds sown by wind and animal, by human hand are not dead either. They only await water and the right amount of light to send out roots and stalks.
I prefer the actual analog in which human and other animals’ bodies, plant parts and the detritus of other kingdoms, all life, return their borrowed materials to the inanimate cache, allowing them to be reincarnated in plant and animal alike, ad infinitum. Does this deny some metaphysical change, some butterfly-like imaginal cell possibility for the human soul? No. It claims what can be claimed, while reserving judgment on those things that cannot.
It is spring, I think, that gives us this hope, no matter how faint, that death might be only a phase change, a transition from this way of becoming to another. It’s possible.
Earlier in the fall when I got up to feed the dogs Orion stood over our fence between the house and the garage, in the southern sky. Still in the southern sky he has moved on since then until he now resides over Black Mountain, several degrees further west. As he moves, he serves, as many constellations do, as a celestial clock of the Great Wheel. The further west he goes, the deeper into winter we are. Weather doesn’t always synch up with his movement any more, but that’s our fault, not his.
Looked at Orion on the way up here this morning. He warms my heart like a familiar friend, a friend who comes for the season. I have greeted his return each autumn for 48 years. We first became acquainted during the 11-7 shift at Magnetic Cookware in Muncie, Indiana. I worked there as a security guard. When I see him in the southern sky, I smile.
No wonder, in a world lit only by fire, that the stars were the work of gods. We might think we know them better now, now that we can identify their chemistry, understand their age and locate them in a 3-D universe, but that’s only a material, physical way of knowing. Important in its way, yes. Perhaps even key to the future of human existence. Still, very different from that night beacon lighting the way to freedom for escaping slaves. And, very different from Orion as my friend and companion for 48 autumns and winters.
This conforms to Michaelmas as the springtime of the soul. Sadness is a way we consolidate past experiences and sort them out, learning from them and choosing which aspects of the past to embrace and which to let go. When our tears are over, we are cleansed and renewed, ready for the next phase of life. Autumn gives us an annual opportunity for self-renewal. This Great Wheel, natural cycle phenomena matches up exactly with Rosh Hashanah and its climax, Yom Kippur.