Luna musings

There is a crescent moon high in the southern sky. It is the last remnant of the Full Beaver Moon or the Full Frost Moon, or the Geese Going Moon, names our First Peoples gave it. Formerly, it was the time to set the beaver traps in the swamps before freeze up, or the last of the goose hunt or the remains of the ground harvest.

In recent nights that same moon, now referred to as a Supermoon, would reach through the skylight above my bed and flood the loft where I sleep. With the moon’s orbit closest to the Earth, it appeared larger and brighter since its last orbit occurrence in 1948.

The moonlight had me awake, so I decided to investigate the number of inventions that have taken place since that moon’s orbit 70 years ago. Curiosity is integral to our being. Expectedly, there is a catalogue of devices that have entered our world, including the transistor, Tupperware, personal computer, sugar packets, credit card, the waterproof diaper, hair spray, the Zamboni, cat litter and bar code, to list a very few. Even ‘Buck’ Sperry, a physics and math teacher in North Carolina focused his love of science on the movement of fish to come up with ‘Spoon plug’—you know, the shiny, wiggly metal lure that every fishing fan carries in their kit.

Tracing inventions and their benefits to global populations can also be read as a road map tracing humankind’s shift from a deep consciousness of nature’s rhythms when human survival depended on it, as in the time of the Geese Going moon and ages before.

Again under the moonlight as I sat by my small woodstove on a restless night, I watched the gentle flames tumble within the walls of cast iron. I wondered if and where we have truly benefitted from invention. Without a doubt, there is a host of instances that have given huge dividends to quality of life. But my thought is not so much about good ol’ days nostalgia but more about thinking of core values.

Being one who experimented with the Harrowsmith Country Life magazine back-to-land lifestyle that came about in the 1970s, I gave thought to our social patterns. The Cold War and escalation of the Vietnam War had a global impact. The blowback was voiced through rejection of the establishment by events like the San Francisco uprisings and Woodstock. Not far from the County, on a kitchen table of a Victorian house in Camden East in May of 1976, using his car as collateral on a $3,500 bank loan and a credit card with a $2,000 limit, James Lawrence, a twenty-something arrival from upper New York State set out to change the face of the Canadian magazine industry. Named after the nearby village of Harrowsmith, with unpaid cohorts at Lawrence’s side, the first edition of a magazine dedicated to socially conscious green living and alternative energy sources was cut and pasted together.

Turns out the large success of the magazine had a split readership of rural inhabitants and urban dwellers-cum-wannabe rural dwellers who bought into the rural lifestyle dream. The readership represented the social shift of re-appreciating life closer at hand. It ain’t easy at times, as most of us come to realize: Spending more time than city dwellers behind the wheel of our vehicles dealing with basics like groceries or medical appointments is one for-instance. What I quickly discovered in my experience back then was that trying to live self-sufficient in most things—heat, food production—meant less time for cultural pursuits— music, reading, writing: So the trade off is finding the conveniences that help with freedom to pursue core interests.

We do a good job of that, I believe. We have a strong cultural drive of population. What I hope for is that we consider what that basic impulse of wanting fewer gadgets and more experiences of the natural world means. Is it a universal wake-up call that the price of convenience is now affecting every aspect of our planet Earth? Maybe we read the seasons and their changes in a more profound way as did First Peoples. How about we come up with a new name for the December moon that tells us where we are in the timeless circle of Earth protecting and Earth taking away.