Moonlight Madness

I’m fascinated when I look at the night sky.  Just seeing the moon, what amounts to a gigantic bolder just floating suspended in the sky above us, neither falling nor spinning off into space, leaves me speechless.  I wonder constantly what primitive people imagined about the great “nightlight” in the sky.  What did they conjure up in their minds about the sun for that matter?  And even in our sophisticated 21^st century minds can we easily wrap our conceptions around a fire ball in the sky, burning for more years than we can fathom…and wonder, who or what lit that fire.

Half the moon is set to face me in a perpetual wink tonight.  The man in the moon hides on its other side oblivious to Venus as she sneaks up behind him.  Earthbound, I listen to crickets and marvel at how they make their music amid the flowers along the edge of my pond.  Just to look at the detail in one of those flowers (called a weed by my county agriculture specialist) the size of a matchhead at most, yet spreading unstoppably across the entire meadow each summer, makes me again amazed at the diversity and persistence of life on this planet.

I feel sometimes like I take life for granted instead of marveling at the immensity of it and the staggering magic behind it.  Today was simply another day of work and obligations to be met, and were it not for this momentary lapse while looking at the moon, I would have missed it and never appreciated it.  Perhaps we all would benefit from a few more moments of seeing rather than looking at the world around us.