I like the moon

by shamanic

I stayed up late in my driveway with a collection of friends, neighbors, and a stunning array of alcohol put together stone soup fashion, so I'm a little foggy this morning. But the moon: it turned capillary in the sky for so long, and the bright edge of it crawling free from the Earth's shadow, even today, with all our science and knowing, still struck the puny human with the neck straining upward as something like a revelation.

What I like most about celestial events and massive, raging storms, is that they push my mind toward the stream of human history and I imagine what it was like for an ordinary farmer, or an ordinary hunter gatherer, to notice that the sky had grown darker and look up and see something extraordinary. We have such rich mythologies to explain these things, dragons and wars between gods and cataclysms that usually fail to materialize. These events have always made us storytellers, and last night was no different. A bunch of us stood in my driveway, reclined on my house mate's car, drank tequila and beer and whiskey (as personal preference indicated), looked up at the sky and told stories to each other. Not fantastic ones, but ordinary ones. "This one time at work..." stories. "On 9/11 I was..." stories. And it was wonderful to spend that time with people I don't know well enough, enjoying the light show almost as much as their company.