The Promises of a Blue Moon

Just once… in a very blue moon
And I feel one comin’ on soon

Nanci Griffith, Just Once in a Very Blue Moon

This August is a month of the blue moon – a month which will have two full moons, one on August 1st and one on August 31st. Given the prospect of a blue moon, the time of year, and Humptulips County’s prevailing weather patterns, this should prove to be an excellent month for watching night skies at the farm and pondering the promises they contain.

Our farm is sufficiently far from anything even remotely urban that we are wholly unaffected by light pollution. Accordingly, from the vantage point of the turn-around in front of our house the night sky is strewn with distant stars tinged with the constellations of ancient human creation and dominated by the near-by moon. Ours is a night sky upon which the primordial past has inscribed inscrutable illuminated runes suggestive of gods, eternities, and infinities lurking within the starless interstices; ours is a night sky replete with possibilities limited only by the narrow vision of human imagination. For on a clear night, ours is a patently visible, unobscured night sky: no more and no less a sky than that which you enjoy, but one wide open to perception and wonder without the necessity of instrumental assistance.

When I left the house this morning, the first of August’s new moons held sway. The light from a full moon is strong and intense, turning night-time into perpetual twilight. On many of my pre-dawn excursions, our normally familiar country lane quickens to life and promises wondrously exotic and adventuresome quests to destinations lying well beyond my daily ken, but only if I can first learn the secret phrase which will allow access to the hidden turnings lying just within the marsh at our property’s edge, at the cusp of the leftward curve at the top of our neighbor’s hill, or elsewhere along its meandering path. I search valiantly for these turnings when I feel their lure, but they always hover enticingly, yet indistinctly, beyond the reach of my headlights. I look more diligently for these turnings while under the spell of a full moon, for I am as certain as I can be that my destined turning unto the mysteries that await us all will only appear then.

On such mornings, Alice’s rabbit hole and Bilbo’s road lie unseen before me, but I pass them by without recognition in favor of more mundane destinations. Many things are semi-visible in our open fields in the half-light, even as shadows hold sway and give cover within the forests and grown-over areas. The twilight is magical. When small animals run from my passage by scampering from moonlight to shadow, they leave me with mere glimpses of beings that might be any sort of life, faerie or real. I am almost certain I saw a bobcat last week during the run-up to the full moon, but it scampered so quickly from the verge into the heavily grass-covered, undeveloped property across from ours that I cannot be certain. It might just as well have been Pan scampering for a better location from which to play his pipes.

I love the magic of these nights and to have two new moons in August by which to ponder and imagine the reflected lessons and meanings of the stars is truly a blessing which comes our way but once, as it were, in a blue moon. Hopefully, this blue moon will not be a very blue moon of the sort Nanci Griffith sings about.

For I believe the starry runes will eventually provide the key to my own secret turning of the heart and that my resulting quest will lie somewhere among the mysterious dark places of our sky. So for now, I am content to ponder these mysteries from the safety of our turn-around or from within the known margins of our lane, because the prospect of adventure is often as satisfying as reality due to the firing of our imagination and our fears into a porphyry of equal parts anticipation, speculation, wonder, and delight.

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