Seeing the Moon

Something drew me to my bedroom window tonight, like a magnet. I pulled the sheer white curtains aside and peered out: it was the moon, a beautiful full moon in a perfectly clear pitch black sky shining brightly on the planet, as if waiting for an audience.

It's the first full moon I've seen in the last few winter months. What a lovely surprise. It lifted my spirit. It almost lifted me physically off the floor. It pulled me up, like it pulls the tides.

I look at the moon and I see you. I see all those I love. I see the moon and I don't feel so far away. I feel connected. It's a kind of wholeness, maybe a holiness, that all of us on mother earth see the same moon in our night skies.

I want to capture the brilliance of it, its powerful light shining through my window, but a photo wouldn't do it justice. How do you capture silence shining? It is too elegant. Many have tried, and I chose this one flikr photo as an example.

Even the moon's landscapes are outlined tonight, a thin grey line around its continents, it is that clear, feels that close, awaiting an astronaut's next giant steps for mankind.

It seems benign, that yellow ball against a black canvas, yet it is pulling oceans and arranging the movement of the earth and the planets. It is conducting a grand symphony that few of us hear. Maybe a wolf in a forest on a mountainside hears it. Maybe a whale at the bottom of the ocean.

The sound of silence. The sound of brightness. The sound of fullness. The fullness of being. It's what Transcendentalist and friend of Emerson's, Margaret Fuller, in the 1840s in America, wished for all humankind: that we grow and love one another "not from the poverty but from the fullness of being." It was her moon song. I see that now. I see the attraction.

I cannot hear the symphony but I feel the pull. The moon is pulling the tides of my soul. I am in Ukraine, but I can be anywhere, anywhere on planet earth, and the moon will accompany me on the journey, and I will be with you as we go.