I went for a walk under the black, moonless sky, later than my usual walk, and also shorter. No further than the stop sign. Orion was higher than he had been on prior walks, almost directly above me. The big dipper more erect. The sky familiar but heightened.
Tonight is a new moon, when I imagine the moon under water.
My body slowed to a relaxed stroll, then a meditative journey, as though pulled by music. Dark houses in rhythmic arrangement witnessed my timekeeping—slower than the clock of accumulating capital. More ancient than the ticking devices that determine when doors are locked, unlocked, then locked again. I kept time with a music that rumbles beneath our modern stories.
There is a story I used to tell my daughter, when she needed nightly inventions woven into her bedtime routine. I told this story on the night of the new moon, and I told it also to myself.
“Once upon a time Elizabeth and Larkin were walking in a magical forest. It was a moonless night. Above them leaves sparkled silver under starlight. Fallen, frosted leaves crumpled underfoot. Tonight they walked a path that led to the forest’s center. The journey was longer and darker than any they had undertaken. The night was so black they couldn’t see one another, so they clutched hands. Strange noises whistled through this part of the forest. Heavy breath, a grunt or a snarl, scampering to their right and left. Elizabeth’s heart quickened at each sound, but she felt the warmth of her friend’s hand and the steady rhythm of her breath, and focused her awareness on each next step.
“When they arrived at the center of the forest, where Moon bathed in a pool of silver water, they were not alone. All sorts of monsters and ghouls and reptiles had joined them. Elizabeth and Larkin looked at one another, then glanced back down the length of their own bodies: they too had become lizards, so frightening had their journey been. Then, a quiet patter of feet. They plunged into the pool, along with all the uncanny creatures, and bathed with the moon.
“Elizabeth felt her shoulders relax as soon as she entered the cool water. As she dove and swam her breath dropped to her belly, then to her knees, then all the way to her toes. She felt like a newborn baby, bathed in ancient light. When she and Larkin stepped out of the moon bath, tired and laughing, they were kids again. And the strange and wondrous creatures were their kin.”
Of course, she was asleep before the story ended, which was the point of its telling. I lay in the dark attuned to the warmth of her body and the rhythm of her breath and the ripple of moon water, and I wondered how to create a geography where our recoiling selves can remain in proximity long enough for breath to return to our bodies. Can the narrative be suspended long enough for us to feel the bristle in our limbs, to look back over the length of our bodies and notice what has happened?
But the rush of history is happening so fast, and the noise of myopic narration is so loud, it feels impossible that our soft animal bodies—bodies that have always traveled in groups, because our young and old need care—might find their ways back to one another.
But perhaps we can find our way back to the moon, whose rhythmic pull reminds us we do not move through the world with the steady blaze of a god. We are, in the words of a friend, “beings to whom things happen,”1 and our nervous systems shapeshift to contain what has happened. We need light that is not reluctant to go underwater, to illuminate the stories submerged.
The caretaking of bodies is the caretaking of stories—a sacred librarianship by which the meaning of history, imprinted on each body, is housed collectively. When the history of what has happened is no longer unheard, no longer clamoring for release, our bodies become free.
I reached the stop sign, much later than I usually do, and I felt my breath move all the way to my toes. It’s that rare feeling of knowing you are exactly where you need to be, turning around at exactly the right time. And so I turned and saw, shimmering down against the black, moonless sky, a shooting star.
The second house from my home a second shooting star wafted under Orion.
And then I was at the doorstep of my home.
Theologian and ethicist Lucila Crena once described her anthropology as “humans are beings to whom things happen.” It’s a premise I feel deeply, and that I think can orient us toward a more collective, care-centered creativity.
Beautiful!