The moon has nothing to tell
I
It’s Friday 12th December 2025. The moon brings light into darkness; reflected light from the sun. It’s sitting above me now as I write at my desk in the loft under two thin layers of roof. Later when I go to the farthest point of the garden, I’ll see the off-kilter half-moon hanging there above the roof that protects me from the rawness of night. I’ll bathe my eyes in the moon’s glow, away from the glare of the monitor. I’ll imagine the freckled moon looking into me; to my musings of connection with wildness which bring me to myself; those layers of mostly forgotten memories, resting in the dark pit of me, darker than night; those layers of amnesia. Profounds of memory. Of nothingness. Of everything. Of you.
I want to say you. I want to say who.
I want the moon to tell me with certainty where I am going astray in my life; from the rhythm of the seasons; from Mystery.
But the moon has nothing to tell. You have nothing to tell.
II
On the day of my birth on 10th January, the moon was in the waning crescent turn, like the letter C. Later, when I was able to name the moon as moon, not a week went by when my dreamy gaze was through the window to the moon. The moon, with the background of stars, fed my imagination more than books. The moon became who, not it. My imagination also came from experiences of wildlife, fast flowing rivers, mountains, life different from me. Whos, not its.
Years later when still a boy, after listening on the radio to Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose, I fixed my eyes on the moonlit sky for the return of the goose, even though I knew it was a story, but no. I wept into my pillow when the goose finally left. I wept many times after that before I slept, for the loss of beauty, the loss of awe, the loss of La Princesse Perdue: the name given to the goose. The pain of knowing that everything ends.
I feel this now, too, when geese return in the autumn. Ribboning back to their wintering grounds, they navigate by the moon and stars and the earth’s magnetic field, by landforms and waterways. Then again when they leave in the spring.
With time, who became it again, though is reversing again now.
III
The moon is the luminary of darkness, of dreams and the unconscious.
Just before the October full moon – the Beaver Moon – I looked for a long time through the window at the moon pasted to the night sky. You hang there in perfect alignment with the horse chestnut tree outside my window, with the last rusty leaves ready to fall.
Two days later the moon came to me in a dream; a large silver disc filled my vision. A woman’s voice to my right, though not even a voice but a thought, a caution, said, ‘Call upon anything, but never call on the moon.’ It was too late. Afraid, I ran into the darkness, then woke up, trembling.
The next day, I began reading an essay by Alan Garner, The Edge of the Ceiling, where he wrote about looking at the moon, who he personifies as ‘a plump little old woman with a circular face, hair parted down the middle and drawn to a tight bun, lips pursed, and small, pebbled eyes.’ In his reverie, this moon watches him from a cane wheelchair where she is sat wrapped in a shawl. ‘She was a waning moon: her head turned to the side, as if she had broken her neck,’ he wrote. This was when he was gravely ill in bed as a young boy, and imagination took him into the ceiling. ‘When I saw her, I knew that I could die’, he wrote. ‘She must not enter the room, and I must not enter the ceiling. If I let her eyes blink, I should die.’
I thought about this passage for days before reading on. About fear, about uncertainties, about longings. Then I thought: Every night is a leap of faith that we awake again the following day. We may not. Some people don’t. My father didn’t. Lying in ICU at the age of fifty-six. Every night my ordinary awareness dissolves into dream awareness, or dream consciousness, which is a type of dying, is it not? Or a type of waking?
I want the moon to tell me the way back to things that matter. Those forgotten profounds of memory. I feel it in me, in my gut, like a vague pull towards Mystery, yet not knowing what or who to follow. It’s a feeling of loss that never leaves me long enough to forget.
IV
The Winter Solstice on 21st December is a tipping-point in the turning year when light returns. With my back to the invisible moon and the bright glint of Jupiter, I’ll walk in the morning glow to the River Tweed estuary and wait for the sun to rise. The tide will rise, too, in swishes and swells, with the caws, whistles and trills of birdlife: gulls, sanderlings, oyster catchers, red shanks. I’ll wait until the sun is above the horizon, like a bright open eye above the holy island of Lindisfarne. I think I’ll notice an energetic rising within me, too. Like a memory of something ancient, exciting, ineffable, joyous. I’ll say ‘yes,’ only ‘yes,’ to the risings, and wait. This ‘yes’ will be a ‘yes’ that opens me to possibility, purpose, meaning. I’ll say ‘yes,’ then wait. Breathe. Listen. Breathe again. Then trundle back across fields to my writing desk.
When the solstice tipping-point comes later that day I’ll visit the trees in the nature reserve at Ford Moss, a few miles away. I want to commune again with the silver birch in their winter bareness. These apex trees who came after the last Ice Age. These trees who know about beginnings. I may make the Winter Solstice a beginning, too. Celebrating with the ancients the return of the sun who lives below the water-line, or beyond the trees.
V
Severance is the permanent loss of connection, like at birth which is also an ending and a beginning. There is no way back to this certain connection, only a knowing that it’s true.
Vague memories of this persist, though sometimes vivid.
Once when I looked up at the night sky my sense of awe was so great that I became one with the Mystery. This was in the May after my tenth birthday. After gazing at the millions of lights, I melted for moments with the scene. I wept then too, for awe is greater than me and brings tears of joy. This was a connection of certainty. I felt it then, and reflected on it for years after, even now. It was a connection so full that there was nothing left of me. Confluent with the night sky. Perhaps just like dreaming in my mother’s womb.
VI
Two years later, on the Winter Solstice of 1968, Frank Borman led the first lunar orbital mission in Apollo 8. On Tuesday 24th December astronaut Bill Anders gave us a picture of earthrise for the first time. The earth rising up on the moon’s horizon against the black enormity of space, like a blue opening eye.
VII
Do experiences of awe inhabit you long after the moment is gone? Are they not gifts from Mystery to influence your life thereafter, forging pathways to awe in memory? Perhaps it’s different for you?
VIII
Recently, Professor Maria Strømme at Uppsala University, in Sweden, proposed that consciousness does not originate in the brain, as neuroscience believes. Consciousness, like the air we breathe, she said, is a pervasive reality to which we return after death. Consciousness may not rise within us. It finds a way into us, she said, just as consciousness, at least, imbues everything with a nervous system. Perhaps even life without.
Thinking about this imponderable now, it makes sense of those rare, spontaneous, temporary experiences of non-ordinary states of awareness. Just like when I was ten.
IX
The first-century Roman writer, Pliny the Elder, in writing on the Celtic winter rite, said druid priests cut mistletoe on the ‘fifth day of the moon.’ That is on the fifth day after the new moon who is dark, when the moon sits between the earth and the sun with the lit side facing away. On the fifth day, the moon is in the waxing crescent phase. The druids thought this was when the ‘power and influence’ of the moon was at its greatest, wrote Pliny. Especially so for fertility and healing, which was why the mistletoe was ‘the all-healing’ plant of the Celts, he said.
Two white bulls were brought to the cutting of mistletoe rite among the oaks, wrote Pliny. Using a golden sickle (though probably gilded bronze for strength), mistletoe was cut by a druid from high up in the oak from which mistletoe rarely grew. Folk below caught it in a white robe. The bulls were then offered as sacrifice to the gods, with prayers for prosperity to those who were given sprigs of mistletoe. Then the feast began.
This rite took place just after the Celts began their month, which was with the new moon. Their day began with the variable times of the moon’s rising. Sometimes their days began with dreams.
X
The new moon in December this year is on the Winter Solstice, the first in years, and the fifth day is on Christmas Day.
XI
I look up at the ceiling. I imagine the moon sitting there above the roof. My desk faces a window to blackness. The reflection of my candlestick lamp floats in the air outside, next to the prayer plant who sits next to it, leaves pointing up. Floating. There are a few lights in the distance. I track where the walls follow the pitch of the roof on both sides of the window. I trace the edges of the room and feel the stillness. The moon-like paper ceiling light is off. Its reflection also hangs outside in the blackness like a grey imposter moon. I begin a question in my thoughts: What is my … ? Then I remember, the moon has nothing to tell me.
XII
Left-brain, right-brain. Folk talk about this, especially psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist who said, to put it simply, that the left-brain is the hemisphere of reason, while the right-brain is the hemisphere of creativity. The right-brain is like a tree, he wrote, growing on one side of the fence, with roots lodging in the soil on both sides. The left-brain interprets the activity of the right-brain, which it experiences too. Though the left-brain is locked in reason which it favours.
XIII
When I gaze at the moon, I pull away from reason while imagination leads the way.
XIV
Psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote that the functions of the left-brain are only relatively stable, in contrast to the right-brain from which the left-brain arises, even as we dream inside our mothers.
XV
The truth is, I am in love with enchantment. I am in love with the tree growing on the other side of the fence from which I mostly live my life. That tree who sits under the moonlight. I know within me that the moon has something to tell me, and I am listening, I am listening with my imagination and intuition. There is no other way. This is my path of faith. Yet faith comes with doubt; the right-brain thinking comes with left-brain thinking, with its doubt. It’s alright. That’s the way it is. Yet the fact is, I am in love with enchantment. I want the moon to tell me secrets of how to live this life. Surely, without enchantment we are lost. Or, maybe it’s me, not we, not you.
The truth is, I am not lost with the rising moon, the rising sun, the rising earth, the inner risings.
The moon has everything to tell, not nothing.