Chasing the Moon
By Jim Dodson

 

 

Like my father before me, it’s the rare morning I’m not up by four o’clock. The dark hours before dawn, I find, are the most peaceful and productive of the day, the time I read and write or sometimes just sit and drink my coffee and try to make sense of a world that often seems poised to come apart at the seams.

In her brilliant new book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor sheds light on how vital the nighttime and darkness are to our physical and spiritual well-being, yet how most of us from childhood onward have been conditioned to fear the dark and associate our worst fears with it – boogeymen under the bed, burglars afoot, animals on the prowl, nightmares, insomnia, dark nights of the soul.

The Bible speaks of the forces of light and darkness throughout, and the light of a new day is always preferable to the mysterious darkness. Be home by dark, our parents warned us. We lock our doors at night just to be safe; we put on the light.

Evil is dark. Goodness is light – or so we are taught to believe.

In a world where intensely illuminated cities increasingly blot out the Earth’s natural darkness, blurring the lines between night and day, Barbara Brown laments the loss of darkness and notes how wrong it is to curse it.

“Darkness turns out to be as essential to our physical well-being as light,” she writes. “We not only need plenty of darkness to sleep well, we also need it to be well. The circadian rhythm of waking and sleeping matches the natural cycle of day and night, which affects everything from our body chemistry to our relationships.”

Wednesday morning was no exception. I rose at my usual time – quarter till four – made coffee and stepped outside to my back garden to look at the moon.

The full moon of October is known as the Hunter’s Moon because in ancient times native people hunted by its light, special because it’s typically up all night, rising at sunset and setting at dawn.

It’s also called the Blood Moon because in its setting phase an hour or so before dawn, eclipsed by the shadow of Earth as it passes directly between the sun and the moon, the sun’s returning light, refracted though earth’s atmosphere, casts it in a ruddy red glow on the surface of the moon – hence the reference to blood.

Wednesday’s Blood Moon was the second one this year, the first having occurred last April around Passover and Easter. In a rare celestial event that has reportedly only happened three other times in the past 500 years, Blood Moons will come again next year in April and late October.

Much of the interest in these Blood Moons centers around Biblical prophecy that holds these rare celestial events – four blood moons in back-to-back years, also called a tetrad by astronomers — herald significant changes for the Jewish people, meaning tragedy that leads to triumph.

In 1492-93, as part of a royal decree that ordered Jews to convert to Catholicism or leave their country, Spain expelled thousands of Jews. That same year, however, Columbus discovered America, which eventually became the world’s safe haven for the Jewish people.
In 1948, following the Holocaust, after 2,000 years of struggle, the state of Israel came into being under Blood Moons.

In 1967, Israel’s triumph in a brutal Six Day War with its Arab neighbors resulted in Jerusalem becoming part of Israel along with the Sinai, Golan Heights and West Bank of the Jordan River.

As I sat on my garden bench in the darkness drinking my coffee and enjoying the sound of the last crickets of summer, waiting for the celestial moon show to start around 5:30, it was natural to remember something I learned way back in my childhood Sunday School days — that whatever name you chose to give the divine force of love that shapes our universe, celestial “signs” are simply one way a loving God communicates with anxious humans trembling in the darkness.

Who can consider the unsettling events of late and not feel in their gut that something is shaking up the planet, urging us to wake up and shake off our indifference. As the Middle East unravels into chaos and the ISIS reign of terror expands with apparent impunity, Ebola is on the march out of Africa and America seems to be sleep-walking into the unknown.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that 40 percent of the world’s wildlife has vanished in just the past forty years, but few seem to notice. Another respected wildlife monitor raises the alarm that a third of the world’s songbirds have vanished. A number of reasons why are cited, including rampant global warming, deforestation, air and water pollution and loss of natural habitat.

As I sat thinking about these terrestrial signs of change and whatever they may portend – a new Black Plague or the mother of all earthquakes — waiting for the rare lunar eclipse to start, old Rufus the cat came waddling back from his night time travels just as the back door opened and my wife appeared in her bathrobe, clutching her own cup of coffee.

What a nice surprise – to see her up so early, something that also happens only four times every 500 years.

We sat together on the bench in silence for a bit, almost like people at prayer, surrounded by the serenity of darkness and the music of the early birds. We talked about our children and watched through the pines as the moon slipped beautifully into the Earth’s shadow. The stars were out and we picked out the planet Uranus and Little dipper pouring its light directly over our house.

“There is one cure for me on nights like this,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor. “If I can summon the energy to put on my bathrobe and go outside , the night sky will heal me – not by reassuring me that I will be just fine, but by reminding me of my place in the universe. Looking up at the same stars that human beings have been looking at for millennia, I find my place near the end of the long, long line of stargazers who stood here before me.”

As we watched, Old Rufus, the wife and me, the moon slipped into the umbra, the darkest part of the Earth’s shadow, producing a reddish glow that bloomed like a blushing Japanese lantern.

“Isn’t that beautiful?” Dame Wendy was moved to remark – at least as much to the heavens as to Old Rufus and me.

As the moon moved lower in the pines and the first light of a new day brightened the sky to the east, we did something purely for the fun of it. Mama in her fuzzy bathrobe, Papa in his tattered Indian moccasins, we hopped in the car and chased the ancient Blood Moon toward the western horizon.

Like children following an untethered balloon, we followed the vanishing moon from darkness to light, all the way out Highway 211 to Samarkand, at which point, somewhere over a peach orchard that has given up its fruit for another year, the Blood Moon melted into the golden light of dawn.

It was a lovely sunrise, I must say, driving home. We held hands with the car windows down, enjoying the rush of cool morning air.

The moment made me wish – hope to believe – that the darkness before dawn is healing and America might also soon be waking up.

 

This “Simple Life” story first appeared in October 2014 in O.Henry magazine.

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