Sun and Moon

Sitting at the bottom of a very hot October day, I waited for the evening breezes and the moon, which, nearly full, would rise behind the pine tree dominating the horizon to the east. I wanted to sit like Su Dongpo or Li Bai and look at it. I lifted my damp hair off my neck, writing in my notebook by the light of the setting sun. 

It happened very quickly. The sun left my page, the house, the horizon. The hummingbirds fought, one driving the other away from the feeder. Then the first snuck back for a drink, though pausing on a branch to check the sky. They have also been quiet during the heat of the day.

The mockingbirds flew from the crepe myrtle to the pear tree as they had all summer. And here came the dark calico cat with its golden eyes, taking a calm cat pose at the back of the garden. Beyond the apple tree, the red-leaved pear stood sharply out against the pine. I saw the moon hiding behind the heavy clumps of needles. It was pale yellow, gleaming like a fruit.

The sky became milky grey, almost too dark to write. The moon seemed to be climbing the trunk of the pine tree. The birds grew quiet. I listened for crickets.

And then the moon emerged, full, brilliant, shining with cool clarity on the garden. The hummingbird feeder glistened. The shadow I cast in the moonlight was as crisp as if it were day.

That year, 1987, I bought a house in Pleasant Hill, a Bay Area suburb. It seemed to me that the metal roof jutting over the cement patio at the back had the precise angle of a meditation lodge in a Chinese painting. In the evenings I sat with the glass door open, looking out and watching the moon, which waxed and waned every night whether I was there to watch it or not.

At that time I didn’t understand the moon’s movements. I knew, of course, that it became full about once a month. But where it made its shallow arc across the sky, and how it seemed to come up a little later each night as it waxed was a revelation to me when I finally paid attention.  What we see of it begins with a lovely evening crescent, which shows itself a bit more each night, untiI the moon is full. It's waning crescent can only be seen in the early morning. I began to know, in each house or apartment, where to look for it, and when.

It seems ridiculous that I had not been taught, or perhaps had simply not registered, how the moon moves with relation to the earth. Even in my feminine body, which similarly waxed and waned, though it often surprised me. Aware as I am of time, what registered most was the relentless schedule of workdays, the time I must be on the train each day, the precious hour I could lunch outdoors on my own, and when I must be in bed so as to do it again.

Likewise, I did not know how far the sun traveled along the horizon during the year. It took living in one house for twenty years for me to realize this. Getting up at the same time every morning, drinking my tea in the same seat at the table, I finally plotted the distance along the hills and rooflines at the back of the house where the sun popped up between the midsummer solstice and the Christmas one. In the evenings too, from a vantage at my desk, I watched the sun’s yearly progress.

Scott Momaday, in his book House Made of Dawn describes how the grandfathers tried to explain to the young how their people had always watched the seasons pass. From a certain vantage, “they must learn the whole contour of the black mesa. They must know it as they knew the shape of their hands, always and by heart. The sun rose up on the black mesa at a different place each day … They must know the long journey of the sun on the black mesa, how it rode in the seasons and the years, and they must live according to the sun appearing, for only then could they reckon where they were, where things were, in time.”

The sun splits us wide open. Once, in my active middle years, since the man I was in love with was married, I tried to make the sun my lover. I lay out in my back yard, in Golden Gate park, on top of Angel Island in as few clothes as I dared. Often only a hat. And the sun was satisfying, with almost human heat and a soft caress when combined with a breeze. Even now, I am far from taking the sun for granted. It is one of the sources of life.

I have never had quite the right circumstances, a broad reach of sky without much extraneous light, to know the stars well. But I did become acquainted with Orion lying along our hillside in the winter evenings, with his belt of three stars. I could site along this belt to Sirius, the Dog Star, the brightest in the heavens. I loved rolling the name of Aldebaran around on my tongue, though I wasn’t sure which one it was. My brother, an amateur astronomer, had once pointed it out. I could always find Cassiopeia, and the Big Dipper, which directed you to the Little one, with the Pole star, or North Star at the end of its handle. And Venus, the bright evening star (planet), often appears just after sunset.

At present, I live in a huge desert city, but I am no less aware of the sky. The incredible azures and lavenders at sunset and the brilliant clarity of most mornings assuage longings for more of a garden. Our apartment faces south and east. The moon runs through its monthly phases in an arc across the sky in front of the house. I have only to step out my front door to watch. At this time of year, the sun rises late along a hospital roofline and sets at the end of our street. All day it warms the front room and never makes it to the back, as it does at the height of summer. I rejoice at the reliable desert sun shining in at a low angle and making the wood and the velveteen couch glow.

I cannot say, even now, that the sun and moon swing through my body, or conversely, that my small collection of ordered cells alive on the planet is entirely aware of them. Unlike plants, trees, flowers, we move around too much! But the light of the sky has a huge effect on my body, health and mood.

I do think Oscar Wilde got people right when he wrote (in pages he worked on in prison, later published by his friend as De Profundis): “With freedom, flowers, books and the moon, who could not be perfectly happy?”