Musings: Go Look

I knew the moon was out there, because I'd seen it, hovering over the part of Nounou that is closest to the Wailua River, already risen, and white, in the late afternoon when a pig came sauntering out of the valley below a friend's house, so casually I thought it was a pet, and it came very near before it spotted me, started and did a little bucking, zigzagging run across the lawn to a thicket that offered safety.

So later, as I stood in my kitchen putting the finishing touches on dinner and debating whether I could be bothered to walk 200 feet to a garden bed to pick some fresh greens, I thought, you've got to be kidding, don't be ridiculous, and besides, the moon is out there.

She was, right above me, egg-shaped, still white, but gleaming now, almost too bright to look at it, but not quite, and so I did, as the finest, laciest clouds drifted over her face and across the narrow band of black blue that separated her from beaming Jupiter. Eventually I tore myself away and picked greens still quenched with raindrops, wondering that I ever could have hesitated to go out and get them, and returned to the house and made them into a salad.

I decided to eat on the screen porch and began turning off lights in the house one by one until I was sitting only in the glow of moonlight so silvery brilliant that it illuminated the dark clouds hanging over the mountains and the only sounds were crickets and the rushing of the stream, the occasional rooster crow or dog yelp.

Though not a person who typically says prayers before meals, the gratitude was so overwhelming that the blessings happened spontaneously and I stayed in that place for a little while, feeling fullness of a different sort, and then I ate, watching, listening, basking, really tasting.

When I had finished, and sat there for a while longer, hearing the rain approach and then arrive, and then depart, seeing the moonlight peek out, then re-fill the sky, it occurred to me that I had planned to write about radioactivity, the whole mess at Fukushima, and I thought, time enough for that. Right now I want only to write about the moonlight, about remembering to look, to go out there.

Thanks to Anonymous who left a comment about Saturday's total lunar eclipse — check it out at A Darker View — and got me thinking about the moon today!