Sometimes the full moon surprises you. Maybe you’re taking out the trash in the evening and it’s climbing up from the horizon. Or you’re on a run and you catch it between houses and trees. Or your alarm wakes you before daylight, and there it is – orange, setting – in a place you’ve never seen it. When this happens, you feel a little embarrassed, like by now you should know the earth’s rhythms well enough to anticipate a full moon’s arrival. I mean, it’s laid out for you on calendars. Twenty-eight days. Four exact weeks. And there’s that tidal feeling that pulls you, because your blood is 95% water and subject to the same gravity as the ocean. You feel the pull but can’t name it until the moon is high outside your window, a flood so bright it casts shadows.
(When you were a teenager a book on the “magic and mystery of menstruation” instructed you to sleep with a nightlight on two nights a month. The nightlight was supposed to mimic the light of the moon and arrange your cycles, make them neat and regular. You tried it once, but the nightlight annoyed you–all of the brightness of a full moon without any of the magic.)
Sometimes you take pains to find the moon. It begins with a sense of obligation. It feels like a personal failure if you don’t occasionally pay your respects. It’s summer and you realize that if one planned an evening carefully, one could maybe go out on the water at dusk and see the full moon rise. Maybe. The tide would need to be high. The moon would need to rise shortly after sunset. This seems like it might be a rare concurrence. To investigate, you run your finger down a tide chart. Strangely, the tide and the times align perfectly, as if this alignment were part of the natural order. Later, you will find that month after month tide, sunset, and moon rise seem to align more or less this same way. You’re again a little embarrassed to have lived decades on this earth and never learned, for instance, that the moon rises about 50 minutes later every day, or that the tides reach their highest highs during new moon and full moon. Pandemic life, for you, has often meant deeper initiation into the rhythm of things.
You invite friends so that you won’t be alone in the moonlit dark. You launch together. The tide is high enough that the water drenches the banks up to the grass line. The seals, parked on the booms, sound like drunk belching humans. A dog at some shore barks incessantly and never stops. No one knows where the moon will appear. Someone says that maybe they see it, but it turns out to be a house light. The sky is now completely dark and you wonder, over and over to yourself, if you got it wrong, if you misread the chart, if you’ll stay here waiting for the moon until you shiver and then finally paddle back to shore in an unlit darkness.
Again, someone says they see it, and someone else says Yes, that’s it. A tiny flurry rises within you as if you might miss the whole thing. But then, there. The moon is rising just off to your left. I could describe it to you, but you’ve seen it before, the moon rising from behind the trees. Even though you expected it, it’s still a surprise.