Blood Moon

I obsessively checked my phone all day long, like someone awaiting a text back from their crush. I was looking for updates from the finicky weather app, as though wishing hard enough might help change what I saw. As I sat watching fog roll silently over the bay in the morning, I took note of when it was supposed to subside. As I ran down the beach with the afternoon sunshine splendidly displayed in a clear blue sky I learned that it was allegedly “mostly cloudy” at that exact moment. Hope returned. Maybe it’s wrong. As the time for that splendid sun’s setting approached, the clouds that were promised rolled in. My heart fell into the cruel hands of the gremlins that lurk in my mind.

“It’s just not meant to be.”

“Maybe I could drive up or down the coast a little.”

“Really, bitch?! Where? Where are you gonna drive that isn’t going to be covered with the same damn clouds?”

“You’re at the fucking beach on vacation. Isn’t that good enough? How dare you hope for more than that.”

During my evening yoga practice the spry woman on my computer screen prompted me to set an intention. I rolled my eyes, but somehow a single word cut through all the gremlins and made its way to the front of my brain: acceptance.

It was past time for an early bird like me to go to roost. I checked the app one more time. Fog and clouds and possibly rain, the screen taunted. I sighed and decided that I had literally nothing to lose since I had no schedule or obligations for the next 129 hours. “Acceptance,” I resignedly grumbled to myself as I set a two hour timer. I grabbed the extra blanket from the closet and laid down on the couch for a nap.

When my alarm went off I awoke surprised to find that I’d actually fallen asleep. (Sleep is funny like that. You can never pinpoint the exact moment it comes upon you, and rarely are you able to distinguish its precise end-point, and yet it is a clearly definable thing that happens in between these necessary ambiguities.) I rolled over on the couch and grabbed my glasses. I scowled out the window toward the bay at a cloud-covered sky. I shuffled onto the balcony to peer over the gables around me in an effort to assess whether I might have a small chance of seeing the moon if I drove down to the beach.

I walked toward the edge of the deck as the door closed behind me.

I turned around.

I stopped in my tracks, and so did my breath.

The moon was right in front of me, perfectly visible in all her already-partially-eclipsed splendor, an entourage of stars twinkling around her. The clouds above the bay hadn’t reached to cover the moon and her closest starlight companions.

I bolted inside and grabbed a sweatshirt, cozy socks, and a glass of water, as I settled in to watch the show. As I returned and leaned back in my chair, a shooting star dashed across the sky just above the eerie darkening moon.

So much more than the sun, moon, and earth had to align in order for me to be witnessing this spectacle in this place. As darkness crept over the face of the moon I began to understand why ancient cultures thought something magical or sinister or divine was happening. It was, indeed, a bit of all three.

As I sat there, I suddenly became aware of the contradictory kind of quiet that I was surrounded by. It was a quiet so profound that it highlighted every single sound. Each slap of a jumping fish’s body returning to the bay was like the violent roar of the ocean waves a few blocks away which couldn’t drown out the frenzied midnight cries of unseen water birds in the marshes. Rather than disrupting it, each sound somehow amplified the stillness and quiet. The weight of that fell over me like the fog fell over the morning bay, wrapping me in a comfort not all that different from the fluffy blanket I was bundled in.

As I watched her imperceptibly slow and yet astonishingly rapid burlesque act, the moon seemed to add something to the symphony of sounds in the silence. It was as though she was whispering some deeply held Truth that was just for me, some riddle that I would have to puzzle over for as long as I live. And I do feel as though I was given some secret wisdom in those moments. I just don’t know what it is yet.

As the eclipse reached its fullness and the splendid orange turned a deep, dark red, it was as though my eyes were playing tricks on me. The moon had both radically transformed and disappeared. She was invisible in the dark sky around her and still refused to be ignored. I was almost embarrassed, as though I was witnessing an intimate moment between the celestial bodies above me, but I couldn’t bring myself to look away. The thing I was witnessing involved things so much bigger than me I can’t wrap my mind around them, and it had absolutely nothing - and maybe absolutely everything - to do with me.

Eventually the darkened red gave way to the smallest sliver of white. And then as if by pure coincidence or no coincidence at all, mere moments after the climax of this sky dance, the clouds swept in and covered the moon and stars.

“Thank you,” I whispered, my eyes stinging with tears at the beauty, unsure of who or what I was talking to and also more certain than ever before. I turned and gazed lovingly at the bay covered with clouds, took one more glance back at the place where the moon lay in her private chamber, and headed back inside. As I snuggled under the covers of the bed that is mine for the week in this haven away from home, I closed my eyelids and saw the stamp of an orange moon glowing behind them. The corners of my mouth curled contentedly up in gratitude. “Thank you,” I whispered once again. And a third time, “thank you,” as I drifted imperceptibly slowly and yet astonishingly rapidly toward that ambiguous place of tangible dreams.