Eau Claire de Lune

Philosophers, poets, alchemists and mystics through the ages have loved the symbolism of the full moonrise, where the eternal light of the sun disc meets the cycling light/dark deeps of the moon in two matched circles across the circle of the horizon. It is said to be the mystical doorway to perfect balance, the apex at the midpoint of the heroic life, at least to those with the leisure to contemplate those things uninterrupted.

In physical reality, that cruel anchor to free intellectual flight, the moon is not a perfect sphere or pure mirror. It is a rock rolling along in space, we imagine it into perfection by the powers of our cleverness, our distance, our longing. The circular year down here on earth is not an ordered progression of celestial spheres clocking along in a cool heavenly dance. It is a hot mess, this thin skin of hope and danger we inhabit with all the other life we yet know. And in this sticky everyday that we swim in, the spheres that clock our lives are a soup of wet atoms, buckshot, peppercorns, and unread email pips.

Like the beautiful moon, I know there is nothing pure about me, we’re two knobbly, cratered, dirtscapes rolling pell-mell through our natural cycles. And like these moon photos I’m pieced together, stained and steeped with the everyday of my home, with sunflowers and jelly, green grass, blood and beer. And I have to believe that unlike the white marble thoughts of smooth-handed philosophers and priests of the past would have it, there is a fully realized life to be lived in the mess and muck of the everyday oatmeal, excrement and snotty tears of engaged living. That intellectual ideological purity is not the only path or even the preferred path to real being. That real enlightenment is available to a woman making bodies, pleasing bodies, satisfying bodies, tending to bodies with the full, unapologetic entanglement of her thinking mind. That perhaps every woman, every one of us, is born with every connection to the Transcendent she could possibly need.