Monday, November 02, 2009

The Satellite of Grace

Go outside tonight if you can, maybe it will be clear and you can tilt your face up to the radiance of the moon. It is a still night where I am am, and the stars have all taken a step back to clear the stage. Only the leaves of the big tree shift a little in the glintering light. Leaves are impatient like that. I love to look at her on nights like this, but I can't hold her gaze for long.

Last night, the wonderful moment before her glory, she rose for me above the big wet and the waves made a song for her that sang and sang and echoes even now. It is hard to hear the salt song when we're under roofs or hemmed by the concrete that is hard but not slowly alive like stone. Hold there in your yard or the park and squint past the annoying edges that intrude of rooftops and power lines and all the other nagardly reminders of our control over electricity, and see if you can remember what it felt like to live within her rhythm and pray for her tides and good favours.
Her strong face cannot compete with the vibrant emanations of the blue teats of our screens and our clocks and our clevernesses. But there she remains, orbiting at a little over 1klom a second now (as though forever) in synch with us and facing us. The impression thus given of our centrality to meaning yet another gift from her. Ah, as light calls forth shadow in the language of psyche, does the moon gift Gaia with more than physics suggests? The teats' glows will fade and the moon will hold us again, hold us still and without judging our notions of independence. The echoes and songs of the salt that we live from will sing in us all whether we hear it or no.

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