Lunar Love
Do you ever feel as if the moon belongs to you? I do. Maybe not to me, personally, but more like to all of us. Yeah, the moon belongs to all of us, especially when it’s doing something snazzy like an eclipse or slashing a smile at us across the night sky.
On warm summer nights in Texas when I was a kid, the sky was so big and clear we could see the stardust. My mom would spread quilts in the backyard, and we’d lie on our backs, Mother and her pajama-clad crew, staring up at the stars, making up stories about the moon. We’d ask a million questions.
"Why is it called the Milky Way?"
"What makes the stars?"
"Are there people lying in their backyards on the stars looking at us?"
And Mother would answer each question the best she could. When I asked her, "What is the moon?" she replied, "A reflection of the sun."
In my child’s mind, a reflection was an illusion, like a spot on the wall reflected off the mirror in Mother’s compact, not a real thing or place to go. When President Kennedy announced that one of our goals as a nation was to land a man on the moon, I thought, "Boy, are those guys gonna be surprised! They’re gonna fly right through it!"
There is lots to know about the moon involving craters and moon dust and lunar modules and such, but that’s never struck a chord with me. What’s important to me has more to do with how we feel in our hearts when we look up in the sky and see it there, shimmering, almost close enough to touch.
At least one night each month the moon gives us its very best shot. No longer is it 238,857 miles away but just right . . . out . . . there—stunning us all, taking our breath away. We scramble into our homes, a look of half-crazed joy on our faces, screaming to our loved ones, "Have you seen the moooooon???" and we drag them outside to ooohh and aaahh with us and sit on the porch and admire it some more and maybe say thank you to God or the universe or whatever power thought the whole thing up in the first place. The native Americans call the moon Grandmother, and that’s always been a sweet thought to me—something beautiful and glowing, steady and dependable, something you can count on. Yeah, Grandmother Moon.
But it’s more than that. Squinting into a telescope at a full moon a few weeks ago, I remembered how I felt as a kid. Lying in our backyard on a quilt that always smelled vaguely like my Aunt Roxie, it occurred to me then (and I still believe now), that mine couldn’t be the only family lying in its backyard admiring the moon. And if there was only one moon for us all to enjoy and we all did, then somehow we were all connected and maybe not nearly so different as we tend to think. If the moon affects the tides and our moods and how rapidly our blood flows, then it is easier to understand how gazing up at it can make you kiss a stranger and fall in love. I find this thought most comforting—to know I’m not the only one who looks at the full moon and wants to yell, "Yahoo!" and jump off the garage.
The moon is our touchstone, a luminescent reminder that we are all in this together. We sing songs about it, write poems about it, and plant crops by it. We watch for it, stare at it, and respect its power. So I had this idea, you see, one not too far-fetched for a person who spends a lot of time staring, moony-eyed, up at the sky.
Jody Seay
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Photo by Joshua Trujillo / Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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Evo, nedavno sam bila svjedok jos jednoj lunarnoj eklipsi. I ako je temperatura napolju bila -150F, opet sam izasla iz kuce da je vidim. Prosla je bila mnogo ugodnija. Bilo je ljeto, i moja drugarica i ja, smo se popele na obliznje garaze (da smo blize Mjesecu) da posmatramo do tada (nama) nevidjeno "cudo".
Bez obzira sto je toliko godina proslo, jos uvijek me fascinira.
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