Full Moon

The moon was full last night. Earlier it was hanging over the harbour and gradually brightening as the darkness deepened. W. phoned just after I first noticed it and I asked her if she could see it from her house (she could once she went to look). I’m not sure now why it was important for her to see it, except that it was so full and round and beautiful in the evening sky.

Later when the night became dark, the moon was higher and smaller, just above the pines, shining white and lighting the ragged edges of a thin cloud, while the wind was still blowing out of the southeast same as it has all day.

This morning early I looked out the bathroom window and saw the same moon beginning its set behind the maples on the other side of the sky. As we drove into the city just after daybreak, the wind had dropped, mist stood over ponds, boats floated above their perfect reflections, and the sky was bright with the moon still there, closer to the western horizon, but still shining its pale white globe above the trees.

I’m not sure what it is about the moon’s presence. When you glimpse the thin sliver of the new moon just before it sets in the western sky, there is both a sense of promise – the moon is growing – and a sense of evanescence – this moon is going to drop out of sight very soon – that are moving; it is a marker, a sign of passing time. And when two weeks later the big round full moon lifts itself up from the eastern horizon, goes through all of its colour and size changes as it climbs – “With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!” – and lights the clouds it sails through, it is a sight and a presence in the life of everyone who notices.

Last night after watching the moon I saw a message on Facebook posted by a good friend in Auckland. She wrote: -there's a gorgeous moon out there.

Her comment made me think about how she is truly on the other side of the world, fifteen hours earlier than we are, and I commented: Here too! Can it be the same moon?

This morning I saw that a friend of hers from Buenos Aires had added: aca tambien !!! IMPRESIONANTE !!! SUPER LLENA !!! I went to an online translator to find that it said: here too!!! AWESOME!!! SUPER FULL!!!

I love the fact that the same face of the same moon can be seen all around the world as the earth slowly turns, and that people I know and don’t know notice it. I think of it especially over the Syrian desert as the land begins to cool, the evening winds begin to blow, and it rises from behind the rocky hills around Palmyra, that desert moon. But it is everywhere in the world the same moon with the same bright roundness shining, and it does speak of the oneness of our planet and the eyes we all look out through, if we care to notice.

As my old friend WCW wrote back in 1917 in "To a Solitary Disciple":
Observe
the jasmine lightness
of the moon.