earlier
Ann and I drove into Joshua Tree National Park at 4:30 in the morning last Monday. Our hope was to swoon under a symphony of milky way inspired stars, and sit quietly for what could be a moving and spectacular and colorfully gracious sunrise. Such a strange travel suggestion.
As it happened, the earliest of a dawn’s light was enough to send nearly every star scurrying on to Japan or western Australia or someplace west of Joshua Tree. As for the sunrise, I’ve seen better in Onset, Massachusetts. I’d seen better from the rented house on a hill three previous mornings. What I do not believe I had/have ever seen, and never was a thought of it in either of our minds, was the moonrise. The moon rise. The tiniest glitter of light over an alien-like gathering of rocks in the east – I was excited to see the first glimmer of the morning star – became, otherwise, the curved sliver of the moon as it inched its way further and then further into our view. Up, up, up.
In a place I best experience as “other”, very much like the “other” I’ve been publicly hoping to become as journaled in this Blog all week, Ann and I were treated to the moon rising – rising an inch, and then another, and then another, eventually fading in the gathering 5:30 light.
“Our ordinary activities – even the innermost expressions of our humanity, musically and poetically expressed – are lit by the moon.” — Five Ranks