Out, at last, after a day mired in to-dos (à-faires or affairs) that take time to disperse, most recently a heap of washing up. Last light as I step keenly along the lane, the sky like a finished dish set aside. Sheep waiting beyond the cattle grid where pines stand out dully against the sky as it deepens, today multi-dimensional, vast, astonishing, and not just the flattened blackness that we often have to make do with for night-time. Beyond the line of the hill a halo is gathering, until the edge of the moon slips up over it. As the road climbs, the moon emerges fast. I go to the high point of the road, to see the dusky shadow of the land lit by the shining orb like a Chinese lantern.
There are no visions, no angels. But silence and myself. The whole tableau – moon, trees, reflected light, horizons, sky, cascades of stars, blurred here and there by smudges of cloud – all of it familiar, yet long missed. My cosmic home, where I may long for the lights of a distant house and a man who would gather me in for the night, yet cannot turn my back on this celestial spectacle, of which I find myself now a part. And so, I stand, I gaze, waiting for nothing, waiting in order to wait, wanting to somehow contain it.
But in the end I hurry back to my lodging, anxious to note down this spectacle, this moment of rising and risen moon, to fix something of it in words to jog my memory, to recreate the silence and apprehending spaciousness, before tiredness blunts and erases it completely. Here, then, is my earthly heaven, the quotidian transfigured by night and by small human lights.
Be_flummoxed 