Looking for the Moon

I went looking for the moon tonight. Sort of like my two year-old niece does when she’s having Goodnight, Moon read to her of an evening. “Dere’s da moon, Tatie!” she says and points her sweet little finger at the book’s picture as she beams up at me.

I once lived in a house where I could see the moon any clear night with very little effort. A big screened-in porch faced just so where the moon rose up gracefully over houses and coffee shops and bars, until it reached its apex well into the evening and then shone straight into the upstairs of that house. When I couldn’t sleep, I could count on it to keep me company.

I can’t see it so well where I live now, and there’s an odd grief to that. I find myself forgetting it is still there at all and then I wonder at the feeling of ungrounded-ness that slips over me. “It’s still there,” a friend said to me recently, “You just have to look a little harder.”

He was right, and so tonight I went looking for it, just before dusk, and sure enough, there it was, a pale soft sliver of silver making itself known in the just-darkening sky. By the time I’d circled the neighborhood to come home, the skies had darkened and the sliver had deepened, grown brighter and more confident, its shadowy edges a musky purple hue reminiscent of dreams that disappear just as you wake, not ever to be fully known.

I smiled, as if at an old friend not seen for a while.

There is a great deal I am not sure of these days. Learning new work continues to be a challenge, even as I find myself supported left and right in it. My precious Curly Girl is no longer a baby, suddenly eight-going-on-eighteen and with such wings on her feet that I know I’ll spend the rest of my life praying for her safety and well-being as she travels and explores and commands the best of this world she’s been born into. This is terrifying to me sometimes (all the time). And as I learn this new space and way of being I find myself in, I am reminded that change, if nothing else, is constant.

I often find myself longing for a long stretch of familiarity and fixedness.

Only the truth is my heart has always been a restless one. This is why I search for the moon, I think–because no matter where I am or what I’m finding my way through, it remains.

I can trust that.

And maybe, just maybe, finding the moon, discovering it is, after all, right there, just as it always has been, is that much sweeter, more sacred, for having been not quite so obvious as it used to be.