Moon 🌝

A reflection on all your cosmic phases

Dear friends, the Year of the Fire Horse is fully ablaze! My life has been full of wild transitions that I’m excited to share with you in the writing that I have planned for the weeks and months to come. At the same time, I’m learning to respect the seasons, including this dry one that has kept my posts at a minimum lately.

As a holdover, I thought it timely to mark tonight’s Lantern Festival (which falls on an auspicious Blood Moon) with this short piece I wrote two years ago when Datu was obsessed with one of his first words, “Moon.” Rereading it today, it reminds me of an era when time moved slower, when as new parents we clung on to his every new word – how we sought adventure from it, and how we marveled at the universe unfolding before his eyes.

Happy LNY!

This evening we took you to the Griffith Observatory for the first time. A couple of weeks ago you started noticing the moon, this orb in the sky that we’ve periodically pointed out to you throughout your life. When you were tiny, maybe even the first full moon that appeared in your life, I held you up to it and howled. A few months later you started repeating after me, “awoooooooooo…” I giggled at its cuteness and its novelty and then, like too many things from that time, I kind of forgot about it.

I hope I don’t forget this time. This most recent full moon, the first in this Year of the Dragon, you pointed up at it in all its bright glory and proclaimed, “Moooooooooooon!” Since then, you squeal with excitement at any sighting, in the sky or elsewhere. In books, on TV, on your clothes, in all of its phases from its fully circular form to when it’s so thin it resembles your fingernail. Once you even pointed at the swoosh on Mommy’s pants, “Mooooooon!” I hope you know that we love you like this too, in all of your moods, when you are feeling full, and new, and waning.

You ran through the halls of the Griffith Observatory with your index finger outstretched, pointing at every sphere and ordaining it a moon. Jupiter: Moon! Mars: Moon! Earth: Moooooon! Every once in awhile you’d come across the other celestial being whose name you’ve learned, when it is presented with its numerous points and edges: “Star.” Mooon, moooon, star, star.

Child, thank you for reminding us that life can be this simple, all in the universe either a moon or a star. Everything else merely a detail made utterly insignificant by the vastness of outer space. When we had to go, you kept asking for more, “more-more,” as you gazed out from the parking lot into the city scape, and the planes, and the satellites. “More-more,” you whimpered as I strapped you to the carseat. “More-more moon,” you wept, as I started the engine home, until you sank into sleep.

But don’t worry, my love. There is so much more. We are not leaving this place anytime soon. We just got here.