The Mystery of The Moon

The Moon’s precision is incredible. What is the point of that precise rotation, exactly? Why? What drives that? That same process repeated, in the same way that the planets rotate around the Sun. There is a need to be at a certain distance from the Earth, to orbit it so precisely every 27.322 days.

Above: The Moon from Nicoletta Ceccoli Tarot

My dog doesn’t get how the car works. It’s beyond him, as the Moon and the planets are beyond me. There are some things that little human minds like ours are destined never to understand.

It is a dark Autumn night. I lie on the sofa, looking out of the wee roof window into the clear black sky. The stars sparkle faintly, but it’s the Moon that I’m here for. I position myself on the sofa so that she is in full view, but only just. Her right curve is approaching the edge of the window, preparing to disappear from my sight. Over the shortest of time, I track her movement with a naked eye; I find that if I close one eye and focus on how she meets the edge of the window, I can detect her movement clearly. She is as slow and as smooth as a snail moving across a garden path.

I recognise the mysterious nature of this cosmic movement; of Earth, of the Moon, everything moving. I am a little creature of the Universe with no clue about reality. All I can do is receive it. I let go of trying to understand it, and I accept it in the same way that the Moon receives the light of the Sun on her silver rock. It’s just the mystery of everything, no need to figure it out.

The occasional thin and wispy cloud passes over her, like a trail of smoke obscuring a streetlamp. It accentuates her glow as it passes and she seems to beam more brightly than she did before the clouds came. I notice that she isn’t quite full – a day away, perhaps – as I breathe in her silver light.

She continues to float, solid and smooth. It seems impossible, such heavy rock floating like that. I imagine her silver light bathing the skin of my face and, for a moment, my cheeks warm, as if the Sun itself were directly upon me. Whether this is magic or a simple product of my mind, I don’t care: I understand magic and placebo to be the same thing.

I notice her deep craters. I wonder how they would look from her surface. How do astronauts feel when they glare directly at her white mountains? How does the Earth look to them when they look back – their true home, with its gorgeous colours glowing in the black of space?

I meditate like this with her for as long as I can. Everything is Moon and, for a few clear moments, I am the night sky. The distinction between me and everything else fades. I am free.

Like the two canines who howl at the Moon in the Marseille and Waite-Smith Tarot decks, I am simply captivated. Like the crayfish or lobster that crawls out of the water and into the Moonlight, I am called to connection. I don’t need logic or reasoning. The Moon has been up there longer than any life form has existed on Earth. Perhaps this is why she has a reputation for being so motherly: she has always watched over life on Earth, whether she knows it or not.

Above: The Moon from Tarot de Marseille (Paul Marteau version)

A bat appears. It flaps its clumsy wings in front of her bright sphere like a drunken bird in a disco light. I smile at this cliche – bat and Moon – as I breathe slowly, in and out. All I need is a wolf to howl and all will be complete. (Not likely in Scotland though!)

She has almost passed the window entirely now. Just a sliver of a glowing curve is left. I am grateful to the darkness of the autumn and winter months for offering so many of these moments. I wonder how many other humans – and other creatures, in fact – are looking up at her right now.

In Buddhist lore, it is said that the earliest monks and nuns got together at Full Moon each month to recite the Buddha’s Dharma underneath its soft light, long before paper existed and the sutras could be written down. When I am lying here like this, with my skin highlighted by the evening Moonlight, I imagine those monks and nuns of years past, chanting beneath the Moon. I see their bald heads and robes illuminated by that mysterious rock. The words of The Heart Sutra (or ‘The Scripture of Great Wisdom’ as it is known in the Serene Reflection Meditation tradition) come to me. I am ‘one with deepest wisdom of the heart, that is beyond discriminative thought’.

Above: The Moon from Orenda Tarot by Bouchette Design

There she goes now, disappearing behind the window for the night, leaving a blanket of black sky and tiny stars in her wake. The Mother of our sky will return again tomorrow though. She’s reliable, like the best mothers are.

That’s all for now, friends. Thank you for being here – and please check out my Therapeutic Tarot Sessions and my courses embracing Tarot and Nature if you’d like us to work together. You can also sign up for the Tarot Blog newsletter (different to my main newsletter) below to receive occasional email updates (roughly monthly) with the latest posts.

Smiles from Scotland,

Stephen