Transcendent Night

Some North American tribes called the full moon of February the Hunger Moon or the Storm Moon. By midwinter the stash of supplies were low and game scarce. I think about all of that tonight. It’s late, past midnight I figure and I find the moon to be calming as it lights up the trail before me.

The shadows of the bordering night forest are as darkened as those of an early morning in May. Actually not, come to think of it. Rather there is more of evenness that moonlight offers, a transparency, a veil of luminescence that is less dramatic but more soothing than the contrasts of a moonless night with that of the noonday sun. And just like tonight, the lunar patterns and timing have been woven into the mythologies and cultures of civilizations since the very beginning.

Actually when I focus on the slope in the path and the footprints in the snow before me, the shadows are a smoother version of tension and release I figure, such as focused work and unfocused play. Not sure what brings this up, but the concept makes sense, right? Somehow in the everyday without paying attention, that balance gets to be more like a teeter-totter, where work takes over until the tension weighs down and we’re a likely candidate for exhaustion—hit bottom in the case of mental and physical well-being. Many of us have been there I realize.

Again, how long can we stay on top, rocking in the carnival of life celebrating in a moon dance? At least as long as we get the impulse that it’s time to get back to the on-ramp, right? But time tells us that a balance can happen if we pay attention.

There is a chewing rhythm beneath my boot heels as they quarry into the sugaring snow; and the light is clear enough that I can pick out the sepia stained pock marks from the walnut husks and the last of dried leaves to fall from the cover of tree limbs above. And even in the heart of winter the sweet scent of woodland decay fills my nostrils.

It’s the dead quiet of the night. Except perhaps for the whiz of car tires on a highway a hundred farm fields away; the distant wail of a freight train yearning from the shoreline that follows the bay; a coyote signals to his tribe that a stranger is stalking—but not really— in their country. Against the backdrop of muted smell and sound, the moon has captured my fancy with its shadowy play of limbs of the birch and hemlock that it stages on the now paled forest floor.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche agreed with Greek thinking and investigated in art form the dramatic theory of the interdependence between the Apollonian—rational—and what the Greek civilization described as the Dionysian—the ecstatic; you know the dance of Zorba; I can hear it now.

Check and balance; maybe that’s what the light is offering me as it carries through the out-reached arms of slender trees. Carl Jung figured we were not a whole being if we denied the dark side of our psyche —the shadow. You know, the duality, the iconic black and white mask of drama. I’m guessing that this lingering moon has called me from the comfort of my chair by the woodstove to introduce me to further wonders. Okay, so by now I gotta imagine that the philosophers of the ages were onto something. The thing I’m really counting on is that the logic part will re-trace my way back home at least at some point tonight.