I Can't Describe the Moon

But maybe that's okay

On summer solstice, I was driving home from a song circle (yup, I’m a person who goes to song circles now) when I rounded a bend and saw the nearly-full moon hovering large and bright in the sky. “Oh my god,” I actually exclaimed aloud. It was just so stunningly beautiful, in a way that mere words cannot describe.

It looked something like this, golden and luminous above the trees against a sunset sky. Photo by Ganapathy Kumar on Unsplash.

When I got home, I poked my head in the door but didn’t take off my shoes. “You HAVE to see this moon,” I told the rest of my family. We don’t have a very good view of rising summer moons from our yard, so I suggested a quick drive. As they piled into the car, I assembled a playlist of three songs I’d heard during one of Elle Bower Johnston’s breathwork sessions that I knew would make a perfect soundtrack, plus Beyoncé’s “II Hands II Heaven” (my son requested—nay, insisted—that we add it, and I agreed it had the perfect vibe). 

There’s a road perched high above the lake that, I knew from experience, is an excellent moon-viewing location. As soon as we turned down the street and glimpsed that glowing orb, a hush fell over the car. There was nothing to be said in a moment like that, awash in the awe of such natural beauty coupled with gorgeous music. It’s like our mobile moon church, I thought to myself. I did not share this out loud. I did not remark on anything, in fact. It felt like the only way to really appreciate the experience was to enjoy it in reverent silence.

As we approached the point where I could’ve turned back toward our house, my son asked, “Can we go again?” And so we did, making our slow loop a total of three times, watching the moon rise a little higher and the sun set a little lower over the lake with each lap.  

In that shared silence, there was some deep listening going on. To the music, to all the nonverbal energies circulating through the car, to the moon itself. If I would’ve interrupted that with a verbose sermon about the moon’s beauty, it would have ruined the specialness of the moment. 

I keep revisiting that experience, because I’ve been feeling a general fatigue with words lately. It has been very hard to write: where once words flowed freely from my fingertips, now everything that comes out is thick and opaque, like a crumbly clay that takes forever to mold into an even vaguely readable piece. This is disheartening for me, because words—written words, in particular—have always been my thing, my go-to way of trying to make sense of the world.

But I just keep feeling called away from words lately, partially because they tend to be heavily attached to thoughts, and I have the distinct impression that over the next year or so I will need to go beyond thought, beyond rationality and logic, to work more in the realms of intuition, emotion, and physically embodied presence. I don’t know exactly what that is going to look like yet. But I’m willing to follow wherever it leads me.

I also have found that my creative energy tends to ebb in the winter and summer. It seems that these seasons are for resting and refilling the well, while fall and spring tend to be times when inspiration arrives in a flurry. Summer is tricky, too, because usual routines are upended, plus I have been dealing with various stressors (haven’t we all??) and going through some difficult inner transformations and I just really need a break! 

All of that is to say: I’ll be taking time away from this space and aim to be back in September. I turned off paid subscriptions a few months ago, and that has really helped lessen the self-imposed pressure I feel to stick to a consistent schedule, so I don’t have plans to revive a paid option anytime soon.

Since I’ll be out for a bit, I thought I’d wrap up by highlighting just a few things that I’ve found inspiring, nourishing, or thought-provoking lately. I shall return as the season shifts. In the meantime, take good care ❤️

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Recommended Reading / Listening / Learning

🌕Another full moon approacheth! I created a short Spotify playlist containing the aforementioned songs (plus a few bonus tracks) in case you’d like a soundtrack for your own moon viewing.

🎶Last November I decided to subscribe to Saro Lynch-Thomason’s Singing the Wheel of the Year course, and it has been so wonderful traversing the seasons with a songscape that feels both very current and very ancient. It has brightened my year in a lot of ways! I highly recommend signing up for her newsletter if you too are hungering for a more song-full life.

📖I recently read Mia Birdsong’s How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community and it felt like she’d reached inside my mind to explore all the disjointed thoughts I had around belonging. Such an inspiring book! 

🔮The fabulous Pocket Coven podcast is back for a new season and I’ve been loving every episode. If you are at all interested in the intersection between magic/witchcraft and mental health, definitely check it out! For me, it’s like the sonic equivalent of a warm hug. 

🦉Moving on to some heavier topics, I found this interview with Meg Wheatley both brutal and oddly validating—it was nice to know that I’m not the only one feeling the massive, troubling shifts in our world that seem to have accelerated rapidly in recent weeks. While it’s tempting to run away from it all and/or fall into despair, this interview helped me realize that there is another path, one that focuses on service and care for our fellow inhabitants on this earth. After listening, I’ve been working to rewrite the definition of hope in my head to align with Vaclav Havel’s: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well. It is the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.”

💀On another cheery note, one of my fun summer plans is to work through Alua Arthur’s (free) Invitation to Live Presently & Die Gracefully, a 7-day mortality exploration. This kind of work feels very urgent to me, because I want to face whatever comes next with bravery and compassion instead of getting stuck in fear and distrust. I feel like that can only happen if I really dig in and go to the heart of what scares me most, by turning to face my inevitable death.

💃And what could be a more perfect outlet after engaging these heavy topics than dance? I can’t believe I’m saying that, actually. As a non-physically-gifted person who has been deeply disconnected from my body for most of my life, I have never felt like dance was “for me”—but recently it has become one of my main coping mechanisms for agitation and emotional turmoil. I’ve been enjoying Dance Church livestreams on Sunday mornings because they’re not about performing a choreographed routine or fixating on how your body looks as you dance. Instead, their focus is on joy, self-expression, movement, and play, and I definitely need more of all those things in my life right now. So if you ever want to dance alongside me in a virtual class, I’d love to “see” you there!