Moonlight

So, I ended up taking the puppy for a walk last night. He'd been out in the yard a few times, and I'd even taken him to the puppy park, where he wore himself out running with the big dogs. Still, he really wanted to get back outside, and when anybody is working the cute that hard, you kinda need to reward it.

So, Bermondsey and I were outside in the dark. The project to reconnect the streetlights after all the road destruction this summer is not yet complete. Very few people were home just after dinner on a Saturday night and all was quiet. Only the house for sale up the street had many lights on, and the moon was full.

Sometimes, if you can catch it on the horizon, the full moon looks enormous and red, like something out of a Shakespeare play. I imagine a bolldy red moon like that signaling MacBeth's guilt, or goading Regan and Goneril to blind poor Gloucester. But once it's perched high in the sky, as it was last night, it seems smaller and purely white, like a gleamingly lusterous pearl. On full moon nights, even here in the city, the moon throws shadows, and you can understand how travel was so dangerous for escaping slaves under the full moon.

Last night the air was still, and the pearly moon was riding nearly overhead, casting a clear and cold white light across the sky. The light was so bright that it created a corona...like a moonbow. Bermondsey was busy with his dog business, and I stood and looked closely at the moon and its ring. It was a complete circle around the moon, standing out from its source with a diameter about 30 times the diameter of the moon itself, a perfect halo.

Yet, as I looked, there was something else at work, because there were clouds being illuminated as well. The longer I watched, the more it appeared that part of the halo was created by a bank of clouds curving along the line of the corona, creating a three dimensional halo that perfectly matched the optical one.

Sometimes we get a glimpse of what we miss by living as we do, in cities, with lights and homes and well lit streets. Sometimes the silence and the dark invite us back from our modernity into the mythic sources of humanity.