That Splendid Harvest Moon

September's moon is my favorite in the whole turning year. It is also (above all others), the one I can't describe or take a good photo of, no matter how extensive my preparations and meticulous my labors. Every year, I potter out to a good vantage point set up camera, telescope and tripod, check everything out and wait for night to fall. The moon rises, and I stand breathless in the darkness trying to capture her with my lens, clinging to a scant handful of woefully  inadequate words to describe the most beautiful moon of the year. Bearing witness to this month's full moon is a personal seasonal rite, and if I had to brew up a name of my own for it, that name would be "Hallelujah Moon".

I once described the matter as something of a cosmic joke, the business of standing outside on September full moon nights and taking photo after photo but never a good one. Well, here we are again, another glorious Harvest Moon has gone by, and another sheaf of mediocre images has been captured. It brings to mind the Zen teaching tale in which an elderly monk on his deathbed was asked to describe his journey through life and replied cheerfully, "just one mistake after another..."

Saturday night's full moon was impressive, but in the greater scheme of things, it doesn't matter how my efforts turned out, and I should remember that - it was just being there that mattered. I was delighted to be around for another glorious harvest moon, and I hope to be around for many more. The moon rose, and we (Beau and I) stood out in the darkness together, watching her and knowing we were right where we should be. As we packed up our stuff to come indoors later, we couldn't help thinking that such magnificence deserved a gesture of some kind, a chorus, a chant or a benediction - something grander and more luminous than our rickety bows and sighs of contentment.

Fog and Morning Field

To Everything There is a Season

Friday Ramble, Drifting

The village is a mysterious place on September mornings. The earth is often warmer than the air above it, the meeting of the two elements turning otherwise mundane landscape features into otherworldly entities, fey and luminous. Autumn moves among us, comfortable in her tenure of mist, rain, wind and madcap tumbling leaves.

There is nothing like a good fog, and September dishes up some splendid atmospheric murks. Mist swirls around everything, draping the whiskery trees, smoothing hard edges and rounding the contours of house and street. The north wind scours leaves from the old trees near home, and they rustle underfoot as Beau and I go along on our early walks. Irv loved this time of the year, and he is always with us. If we listen carefully, we can sometimes hear Cassie and Spencer pottering along beside us too, their happy feet doing a kind of scuffling dance through the fallen treasure.

Out of the pearly gray and sepia come sounds now and again. Birds converse in hedgerows and geese move unseen among the clouds, singing as they pass over our heads. Doors open and close as sleepy residents collect their morning papers. There is the soft growling of automobiles and the rumble of buses, the muffled cadence of joggers gliding through the park, the footsteps of commuters heading downtown to work. Once in a while, there is the whistle of a faraway train, just a faint echoing in the air. 

This is the first week of school, and children are on their way to class, walked there by parents, siblings and (often) the family dog. The kids chatter like young birds, as brightly plumed as finches in their leggings and anoraks, carrying umbrellas and backpacks almost as big as they are. Near home, raindrops beat a staccato rhythm on roofs, and little rivers sing through the eaves. All together, it is symphonic.  

On such mornings, the world seems boundless, brimming with lucent, floating Zen possibility, soil and trees and sky and mist giving tongue in a language that is wild and compelling.  Part of me is curled up in a slow breathing meditation, counting my breaths, in and out, in and out. Other parts are out there drifting along in the fog with my companions and happy to be doing so. I love September, and it's all good.

Wordless Wednesday - Rain, rain

Honeybees and September Asters

Thursday Poem - September Mosaic

Before we come with rakes and crackling
energy to clean it up,

the back yard is precisely

as the dog prefers it -- left alone,
a natural selection
of leaf, stick, bone, pod, seed, and stone.

But we are cosmic instruments of music and disturbance, only
animals by half,
and will not let the season bleed
its shifting earth designs
of stone, bone, leaf, stick, pod, and seed.

Some earthscapes rearranged
are gardens, or hillsides
shorn to make a path for wired poles
or graveyards stiff with grief
or clearcut forests. Let me take care
of seed, stone, pod, bone, stick, and leaf.

Let me recall the universe
is breathing in my breath, it plays
its tune in me, it dreams my being --
an unnamed, unrecorded god
becoming conscious as I am
of leaf, seed, stick, stone, bone, and pod.

I am a painting made of sand and pollen.
Structure and spirit
are my codes. Nothing of life
is random or a trick
I draw myself a part of all
with pod, leaf, bone, seed, stone, and stick

The circle of the seasons turns
and never comes back quite the same.
Fertile impulses in time
will overgrow the patterns I have sown,
return to animal wilderness
of stick, pod, stone, leaf, seed and bone.

Let me be glad
new seasons bud from stick and leaf,
new forces split a pod and spill the seed,
new rhythms rise from stone and bone.

Dolores Stewart, (from Doors to the Universe)
Bellowing Ark Press, 2008

Wordless Wednesday - Morning Offering