Now the Moon

Once again the vision came while I was driving. This time in the pre-dawn darkness on our way into town for Fremont Sunday Market. Mary Jane was sleeping over on her side of the van, freeway all but deserted at five on a Sunday morning, when something caught my eye off to the east. The moon in crescent phase oriented almost exactly perpendicular to the horizon, still low enough for the magnification effect to slightly distort its apparent size, with Venus showing just below and to its left. That view alone is always beautiful, but the unique feature on this particular morning came from the hazy cloud cover through which the moon's light passed on its way to my eye. Almost like the cliche image of the Christmas star on a dime store holiday card, the light defused into two sharply defined shafts, one extending above and below the disk of the moon, with a second band, not nearly as wide that extended to the east and west. I have seen the loom of moonlight scattered through light clouds before, but always in defuse, amorphous smudges of light. This effect was very different, each shaft of slightly orange moonbeam seemed to have fairly sharp edges along most of their length, gradually fading off to darkness at the ends. Fascinatingly beautiful, the image quickly disappeared behind the next hillside along the east side of the freeway, just south of two twentieth interchange, and by the time the horizon opened a bit a hundred blocks further south most of the effect had vanished. As is the case with most things we encounter in this life, there for a moment then gone forever.

As I have gotten older the tendency to find cosmic meaning in things like the unusual sunrise I wrote about recently, or this spectacular moombeam trip has diminished; or maybe more to the point my interpretation of meaning has changed. Whether one believes in God waving a magic charged hand and casting the cosmos into existence with a zap of heavenly juju, or that all the stuff in which we find ourselves just is, one thing is indisputable. We are stardust. Created in the heart of a super nova, cast out into the cosmos where it managed to swirl together in strange combinations, some of which form self aware beings capable of looking back across the universe at itself. Quite amazing really. Compared to this level of meaning, all the various signs and wonders of my youthful fantasies appear strangely dim.

What does that all have to do with seeing another very unusual light in the sky? Nothing really, except as a way of countering my wife's first question after relating the story, "so what does that mean?" Implying that seeing two once in a lifetime celestial events surely must be a message from the great unknown. To which I say not so much, just lucky to be in a specific place from which the combination of atmospheric conditions and light from sun or moon reflected into my eye at from unique angles. The wonderment in this is quite enough to keep me in awe.