Mabon Elk Rut Moon
The bloody supermoon. Saw it last night over Conifer Mountain with Kate. We stood at the end of the driveway, she in tie-dyed t-shirt and a small Hawaiian quilt for a skirt and me trying to make sure I didn’t fall in the ditch. It was, after all, dark. It reminded me of a frigid Minnesota night, a January of long ago, with the Woolly Mammoths at Villa Maria in Frontenac. We went outside to see the lunar eclipse. The air temperature was well below zero, maybe 15 0r 20, and we stood, in the dark, marveling.
When I checked Facebook this morning, I saw many cell-phone shots of the super, bloody moon. They all proved that cell-phones are not a good choice for photographing lunar anything. Too far away. They also proved the old lover’s promise, we’ll be looking at the same moon.
As any reader of this blog can attest, I start with the same two things every post: the Celtic season on the Great Wheel and the current moon. The spiral nature of time is caught by the different seasons of the Celtic year, seasons which recur, and the always changing, yet always the same phases of the moon. This focus helps me stay in context with the natural world, in it and of it.
It also reminds me of a crucial fact. This life will end in death, but death is not the end. It is, like the recurring Celtic seasons and the phases of the moon, a moment in the spiral passage of the human species from yesterday to tomorrow. I am neither the first nor the last, but rather part of a widening gyre that is the cumulative experience of what it means to be human. I contribute my part, then make way for others, just as the blood moon departs to make way for countless more phases.
