When night is day

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The Hunter's Moon, October 2024.

Bright moonlight proffers alternative glimpse of the world. Also how catastrophes make one feel like there is no day, only the suffocating darkness.

Well, that's a mouthful, notes I made over an hour ago while sitting in the not quite dark living room feasting upon the moonlit landscape. The Hunter's Moon is indeed bright and beautiful in our clear Humboldt sky, and despite being awake since, oh my goodness, three a.m., I was cognizant enough to note a title for today's entry and scribble a couple of sentences for later perusal.

So now it's later, which can be qualified because while it's also five thirty (at the time of writing) in the morning, when one is up at three, five thirty seems like mid-day, kind of how the night appeared, not really like night at all. It's currently this twilight-night, that marvelous moon illuminating far beyond what spotlights could achieve. I was up early yesterday (although not so stupid early like today) and the moon was already slipping past the northern treeline. But today, woo boy! It's truly like an alternate universe, similar to how the shore appears at low tide, revealing a world often hidden by nature.

Cloudless nights are rare here, so I don't mind not sleeping when I'm, ahem, supposed to, with the treat of witnessing such a spectacle. Yet there are considerations to be noted, because there is day and there is night. And even on the brightest night, night still casts shadows, still feels cloying, still stirs anxiety that day seems to dismiss, even cloudy days. A dear friend of mine is facing her son's cancer diagnosis with the added burden of living far away from him. Others in my realm are dealing with cancer, its prevalence frightening. I will mention the upcoming election in the vein of something which seems suffocating. I am SO EAGER for the fifth of November, not that we'll have an answer right away, but at least all this uncertainty will be traded for a short-lived (God willing) ambiguity that (again God willing) will be for a much greater good. Well, it will be for some kind of greater good, as I firmly, if not at all times freely embrace ALL THINGS are for the greater good. Just that sometimes the greater good is on a timeline so stretched I'm reminded of Martin Luther King's refrain of ...free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.

I stepped outside to snap the landscape, but night mode on my camera distorted the moonlight. Yet I did capture these gorgeous stars.

However the election goes, soon it will be past. Soon the morning will emerge on this eighteenth day of October, and soon the Hunter's Moon will give way to a new moon. I won't speculate on the health of a man in his early forties who I have known since he was barely twenty years old because it's terrifying to ponder someone with a young family wracked by devastating illness. Not that it's too close to what my sister-in-law faced a couple of years ago, the rest of my family also bereft as we fretted her and our beloved's waning battle with cancer, but because, well, it's not quite six a.m., too damn early in the day to wrap my head around such awful circumstances. Easier to skirt around that by noting bright moonlight proffers alternate glimpses of the world when catastrophes make one feel like there is no day, only suffocating darkness. This is why I wrote Life Stories after my brother-in-law died, trying to assuage my heart and mind at what seemed like senseless loss. It wasn't, I mean, it was but it wasn't, in that everyone dies and sometimes the manner of death feels utterly without merit or meaning. Much in this life seems that way, but again, to quote Dr. King, "With this faith we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last."

Just need to put things in perspective, bright moonlight and grace making that possible.

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