Full Moon

Peo­ple are more inter­est­ing dur­ing a full moon. Each month I notice the ten­sion lev­els go up a bit for a cou­ple of days. Birthing cen­ters fill up. Cri­sis lines over­load. There is an inten­sity to just about every­thing that is a notch or two above the norm. Other indi­ca­tors can be men­tioned, but these are just obser­va­tions about how nature affects us more than we think. “Mind over mat­ter” is really very lim­ited. Mind depends on mat­ter a great deal. For now it can­not be sep­a­rated com­pletely from the body as “the bearer of the soul.”

Though I stopped howl­ing at the full moon when I got rid of my beard, I still stop to take in its mys­tery and beauty. Some­times it is after dusk; some­times it is at mid­night; usu­ally it is around five AM when I am walk­ing across the street to the office. It moves gen­tly in silence toward an ignored set­ting in the west. By then most peo­ple do not see it. They are get­ting ready for the day and hur­ry­ing their chil­dren off to school. An exis­ten­tial moment with the full moon can set a bet­ter mood for the day if you just take the time for it.

Slow down. Nature offers a smor­gas­bord of cos­mic events day by day. They are there for soul-moments and to trig­ger one of the most neglected emo­tions that we were designed to embrace as often as pos­si­ble — won­der. The reduc­tionisms of the sci­en­tific age have taken a chunk out of won­der. Sci­ence has done many great things, but “sci­en­tism” (the belief that the sci­ences will even­tu­ally explain and con­trol every­thing until God is no longer nec­es­sary) is a gray god in itself. It is the infe­rior ego/bully that pos­tures with an arro­gant atti­tude and con­de­scends to destroy your view of the things that make life fun: Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, ET, and all of the things that “go bump in the night” and hit the won­der button.

I have made my way through life as a philo­sophic roman­tic. It has been a great deal of fun to keep my eyes on the hori­zon and stop a moment for the falling stars, thun­der­storms, and the sound of the first snowflake hit­ting the win­dow in the gusty winds of a desert win­ter storm. A romantic’s list is longer than this life allows to ful­fill. Give me a dirt path rather than a side­walk and the sound of rustling leaves over the applause of a crowd. Life is more in the heart than in the head.