Creative Rhythms

February 19, 2008 · by Christine

Moon

The moon is full tonight
an illustration for sheet music,
an image in Matthew Arnold
glimmering on the English Channel,
or a ghost over a smoldering battlefield
in one of the history plays.

It’s as full as it was
in that poem by Coleridge
where he carries his year-old son
into the orchard behind the cottage
and turns the baby’s face to the sky
to see for the first time
the earth’s bright companion,
something amazing to make his crying seem small.

And if you wanted to follow this example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.

And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.

And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circles on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night.
 
-Billy Collins, from Picnic, Lightning

The moon will be full this Thursday, February 21st.  Billy Collins is one of my favorite poets, I think largely because of both his narrative and humor-filled style.  I feel like in each of his poems he is telling me a story about grace and delight.

There are no children in our home (by choice, I might add), and so I gather “the sleeping infant of (my)self” to go out into the dark night and drink in the inky beauty of white rock in a sea of blackness.  My sun sign is Cancer whose planet is the moon.  I have always felt an affinity for the moon and her phases and rhythms, appreciating the profound wisdom of her gentle waxing and waning as a mirror of the movement of the seasons from flowering to death and back to blossoming again.  I wish in my urban life I could see the moon more clearly, more often, except that I live in a city whose trademark is cloud cover.

So when we have weeks with clear skies like last month, where the full moon begs to be witnessed and invites my wide-eyed wonder, I make the effort to see between buildings and lamposts. I pause and breathe in the beauty of fullness and radiance.  When I am at the hermitage on a full moon night, I can see the mountain snow at midnight as a luminous pale glow on the horizon. I celebrate the gifts of light reflected to the world, just as I honor the gifts of the new moon, who retreats into the shadows to renew as we all must do at times.

My life these days feels very much in a full moon phase.  Opportunities and new ideas seem to abound flowing easily from me and I am grateful, knowing that it is only possible because I have allowed myself also the space for rest and being.  Even in the midst of full moon activity, I heed the invitations to moments of stillness for reflection and regathering.

Are you in a full moon phase or a new moon phase?  Are you waxing or waning?  Can you honor whatever place you find yourself, knowing that you will slowly move around the cycle?

-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts

(photos taken in a Seattle winter night sky)

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