The moon has the
power to blow me away, bowl me over, take me out of my head and down the
sometimes-very-long highway to my heart. In short, to save me. It did last
night.
Sitting in a
turnout on a busy north/south highway just two fifty-five mile per hour minutes
from home with the car backed up to an unsightly Cyclone fence, we witnessed
the perfection of the rising moon. The sunset, just three or four minutes
behind, was our escort along the stretch of road to our east facing viewing
spot. The sun’s afterglow gently laid out, low across the western horizon, sweet
baby pinks, neither thick nor wide nor overbearing. In my very literal way, I
was looking due east when all of a
sudden out of the corner of my eye (a fair bit south of due east) something
loomed: foreign, suspended, unusually
and exceedingly gigantic; it wore an odd
color only the tiniest bit like the flesh of a pink grapefruit with a translucent-milky-white icing, and the greatest bit like nothing I have ever seen.
One of my usual expletives steamrolled the quiet chitchat as we waited; I think
I ravaged the word “god!” with “woah-oh-my!” It took a full several seconds
between seeing the hanging orb and my brain’s formation of the word “moonrise.”
That’s how unusual last night’s
saving-grace moonrise looked to me. After a few more banal, guttural,
inarticulate, praise-intended syllables, I fell silent. And just watched.
It doesn’t
really matter what preceded the moonrise, certainly nothing earth-shaking –
especially not the rampant rattling conversation in my head about to-do lists
and logistics. But the moonrise rescued me from the inner chatter. It dropped me
into the bliss of silence, of sereneness, tranquility, clarity.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
