The Missing Moon
by Dana Gerhardt

Last week I took one of those long melancholy walks through the surrounding orchards.  The leaves had gone from an intense ocean of yellow and red to a twig-gray sea in just a matter of days.  My dog followed his nose, searching for hold-out pears on the ground, barked at strange new apparitions revealed by the absent leaves, then circled back, leaping with joy around me.  By the time we reached the great stack of empty crates in the orchard’s center, my mood had shifted.  I had successfully harvested and burned the little grievance that had started me on my walk.  I headed home.

It was after sunset and I looked skyward for the first quarter moon.  But it wasn’t there!  I reeled a bit, scanned the western horizon...  where was the moon?!  No clouds were in the sky.  Surely I was missing the obvious.  Could daylight savings time have so distorted my sense of when the moon would rise?  It had to be right in front of me, like that missing checkbook, watch or ring just held, but now impossible to find.  The moon never appeared.  By the time I reached the house, I had to save myself from too much cognitive dissonance:  I began thinking of other things. 

Next morning at the kitchen window, there it was:  not the first quarter moon.  It was the last quarter moon, sinking in the west.  I had lost time.  I’d been in the waxing cycle when it was waning.  This hadn’t happened since I started my moon practice in earnest years ago.  True, I’d been sick for the past month and had suffered many distortions.  So here was another.  Even so, it served to remind me how real is moontime in my life, even more than the dates on a calendar.  In the spirit of losing and finding what’s important, I share with you the first of my seven recommendations for successful moon work.  The following is excerpted from my “Seven Secrets to a Successful Moon Practice.”

Since growing up in the fifties, I’ve had plenty opportunity to imagine the end of the world. Whether it came by atomic bomb or a slow poisoning of the planet, I’ve seen myself surviving, traveling post-apocalypse with a neo-feral pack of others, trying to re-start humanity.  My gift would be my knowledge of the moon. I don’t mean tricky moon facts like when to plant seaweed and barley. I mean knowing where and when the moon will rise each night.  Over which mountain.  At what time.  In what phase. 

This moon cycle never changes. All new moons rise and set with the sun. The moon comes up about an hour later each day, so that the waxing crescent appears low in the western sky at sunset, and the first quarter moon is always high overhead in the early evening. All full moons rise in the east after sunset. Learn this. You can start with a moon calendar, but as soon as possible, wean yourself from paper and study only the sky.  Note how the waning moon shows later each night, eventually rising well after midnight, sending the last quarter moon over your house by early morning. The dark (or "balsamic") moon rises just ahead of the sun and eventually disappears in its brilliant light. 

Commit to observing the moon’s cycle from your home on earth. You’ll awaken the part of you that wants to live in moontime, blissfully and spaciously away from the constricting speed of modern life. You can overlay this self on top of your civilized other. I’m less inclined now to believe our world will suddenly end.  More likely this has already been happening, though slowly.  Just as the next world has been steadily dawning.  Keeping a connection with moontime can draw you into this fresh new world.