In the first hours of this day was the full moon, and we could not see it.
Of course, we could not see the bowl atop Spoon Mountain, either, nor the sky behind them both.
Even had there not been a lunar eclipse during the time of the moon’s perigee, it would have been veiled from our sight, courtesy of the snowstorm that arrived somewhere around midnight. The snow struggled at first, barely dusting most surfaces — less a matter of few flakes than of ferocious winds that drove it straight on the horizontal, sweeping it up to drift in odd arrangements. Eventually, though, the winds calmed themselves, or perhaps were merely spent, and the snow began to accumulate.
We now have several inches of ground cover, and it’s still falling.
The dogs are ecstatic; the wild birds seem joyous, too. It’s not all that cold — just cold enough to support the crystallization that turns water from the sky into something ethereal.
This weather is expected to continue into tomorrow, which means that we will not see the moon in anything approaching her full phase at all. In my own people’s way, this is the Snowcrust Moon, and it somehow seems especially apt this year, even if her face is hidden from sight. In an ordinary year, a storm like this would be equally ordinary, just another day in March . . . but nothing is ordinary now.
And if ever we needed to be able to know that we can rely of the presence that which we cannot see, it’s now.
This week’s Monday Photo Meditation is built around the image of just such a presence: of a moon in full cold glow, rising above the ridgeline to light our world in these nights when winter has not yet released its grip on our world. The image above is one of an whole series that Wings shot eleven years ago, in 2013; from the position of the moon in relation to Spoon Mountain, it would have been sometime between January and March, although from its appearance, I also suspect it was the night before its full phase. In that series, Wings captured it on the rise, and from various distances, the flame-rose glow of the setting sun caught by the snow draped across the ridgeline. It was a time of twilight manifest in both halves of the sky at once, a phenomenon mostly of the cold season, or of the monsoonal rains of summer.
Increasingly, we see such events at odder times of the year.
Increasingly, too, we see nothing at times of the year when we would ordinarily expect to have a clear and unobstructed view of all the lights our local skies have to offer. There is, of course, the light pollution that attends the growth of the current wave of colonial invasion, but in this instance, I’m talking about something else entirely: Now, at seasons when we are accustomed to perfect clarity of night, we often have full cloud cover. Night clouds, night rains: Both are an aberration here, or at least they used to be.
It’s not a sign of a healthy ecosystem — but that said, it is, under such circumstances, a gift, if perhaps an inadvertent one. In a land caught in the death grip of record drought, a land increasingly at risk of wildfire conflagration at all seasons, precipitation in the dark hours does more good than daylight rains: The water does not evaporate, and the cloud cover keeps temperatures more moderate, allowing a thirsty earth to absorb the medicine.
And we cannot afford to fail to acknowledge or be grateful for that now.
Much has changed since Wings caught this photo of the moon in full cold glow. On the climatic front, none of it has been for the better; indeed, the speed and force with which catastrophe has snowballed is already nothing short of cataclysmic. It makes hope ever harder to sustain, while fear grows on every front world-wide.
But there are constants, and we need to remember their gifts and honor their medicine. The moon’s presence is one, still lighting our world even when we cannot see her face.
~ Aji
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