Over the past four days I have been taking a break. I have had difficulty finding the Internet. My cell phone only worked in certain places. February in Minnesota seems made for taking breaks. I remember when our children were little how the teachers always concocted a week in mid-February when they would have theme days. Monday would be ‘wear your pajamas day’, Tuesday was ‘beach day’, Wednesday was ‘fiesta day’…..you get the picture. This mid-winter break is needed in a landscape that tends to be varying shades of white and gray for far too many days. Everyone needs a break from the sameness.
My break took me to visit my mother for her birthday. It was a surprise and she had the good fortune to have her birthday fall on the same day as the Lunar Eclipse. After celebrating during an unusual snowy, cold southern Ohio day, we headed out to dinner with my siblings and their families. After dinner s we came out of the restaurant, the sky had cleared and the full moon shone bright and bold in the sky. I pulled my young nephew close and told him to watch the sky….the moon would soon disappear in our shadow. His bright eyes mirrored the moon with their awe.
Driving home through the countryside of barns and snowy empty fields waiting the gifts of spring, we periodically looked heavenward to see the progress of the eclipse. Clouds leftover from the snowstorm moved across the view of the silver white sphere. By the time we reached home the shadow had begun to fall across the moon. Here we stood, whirling without full awareness of our movement, watching our earth home’s cosmic effect.Every twenty minutes or so we would throw our coats on again and go out to check the progress…dark haze, black, gray….and then orange. As the eclipse came into its fullness….orange. We stood there knowing that this was a special day, a special moment, observing our turning on the earth and the turning of another year in my mother’s life. It was a gift to be together.
Later when I called home to Minnesota, my family told me they had been out looking at the moon also. I remember as a child thinking about the fact that the moon I saw was the same moon seen by children in Russia, India, Australia, Viet Nam. I had never been to those places but it was something I had in common with these children….we shared the same moon. Their languages were different, their religions were perhaps different, too, but we shared this amazing night light that watched over us as we slept. It gave me a calm comfort somehow to know that I shared this gift with those far away, those I did not know.
On Thursday I was comforted by the fact that I shared this amazing light with my mother, on her birthday.
"Sister Moon, I greet you, companion of my darkness. You are icon of the fluid God. Waxing to your fullness, you do not explode; waning in your emptiness, you do not die. Through all your changes you give your radiance. You embrace your shadows and are born again. From the burning day I hide in you. In the darkening night I seek you face. Guard me in my restless dreams, bless me with your ebb and flow that I may weather every change, thou vigil light, thou Sister Moon." Jan L. Richardson