I was 7 years old when I fell in love with the moon. I was at summer camp for a second year and tormented by one of my cabin mates. This caused me to be homesick; I wanted out. I wanted my mother to make me feel safe. A wise head counselor would stop by my cabin and take with her into the night. She made me feel special, told me wonderful stories, and taught me, with her, how to howl at the moon.
Those nights with that counselor, out under the stars, calmed my spirit and mothered my soul. We’d howl at the moon, snuggle close together, sit quietly at times and just listen to the night. My homesickness was cured; my mothering needs were met. Something deep and archetypal and spiritually fine awoke in me and held me tight.
The moon has fascinated since time began. Early man, according to Eliade, incorporated moon cycles into their ritual. The moon, for them, was a magical creature that danced out life’s story, revealing the cyclical recurrence in everything living. The disappearance of the moon was never final. It always recycled back with a new moon, a new cycle. It was a sign, for early man, of the necessary regeneration in the life-death-life cycle. It generated hope, says Eliade, for what otherwise seemed to be random occurrences and catastrophes.
We post-moderns are so removed from nature and its cycles. We’re insolated. We’re more comfortable with perfection, with persons and things in their prime, with the up-swings in life. We feel cheated and personally deprived with the down swing. Every living thing, writes Eliade, in order to recover vigor, to put out new growth, “has to be reabsorbed back into the formless from time to time; restored, somehow, by the primordial darkness from which it came.”
Underworld experiences do this for us. They carry us, against our conscious will, into the darkness of some black experience, only to spit us out on the other side with new insight and vigor. Within our dark moments, light emerges like a new moon and revives, renews, starts us off again on a new plane, with new insight, with a clean heart.
Our darkness, never final, is, indeed, a cleansing agent, a tearing apart so things can be put back together in a different way experience, a returning-so-we-can-remember experience. It is the natural order of things, like the moon recycling, waning, and then reviving itself. We are recycled back, re-membered back, reacquainted with something we have forgotten about ourselves, dipped once again into the primordial darkness of our origins.
Relationships go through this cyclic pattern –.periods of disenchantment, a loss of vigor and nurture, a questioning of why we got in relationship with this person in the first place. The relationship suddenly seems dry, stale, without enthusiasm (without breath). We have to dig deep, hang in there, work it, until the relationship – the love and commitment – revives, once again, from the ashes, renewing the meaning of why we are together.
One reason addictions are so entrenched in our society is that we don’t know how to deal with these natural cycles. We are suddenly starving, restless, irritable, for no apparent reason. Instead of digging deep and discovering what in us needs to be renewed, we turn to food to fill our hunger, to alcohol to ease our restlessness, to casual sex to release the tension.
If we can consciously hold the tension as we move through the down cycle, we can work with it until we can release it into the renewed energy of the up cycle. It’s usually a spiritual hunger and not a physical hunger at all, an existential problem, not a real danger. Our spirits are hungry to find life or meaning in something. We need time away, a moment of clarity or rediscovery, solitude. Then we can rejoin whatever we sought to evade with renewed energy.
The moon, I’m told, vanishes from view for three days at the end of its monthly cycle. This absence, this disappearance, is metaphor for our own descending, deep into our interior, in order to discover, within the present circumstance, the vigor we need to embrace our commitment. We return to the upper world, the world of our visible endeavor, put back together in a new way, not noticed, perhaps, by those around us, but energized and more insightful.
The moon mirrors life for me in other ways. Watching the moon shift shapes and sizes has allowed me personally to become more comfortable with my physical body. I see my body wane and revive, my energy wane and revive, all towards some sacred wholeness that stretches beyond awareness. My moon compassionately companions me in my up and down weight cycles. Perfection to me is now no more important than any need for the moon to always be full.
The moon doesn’t change; the light of the sun on it changes. We can’t always see its full shape. Hidden in darkness, the fullness is there, ready to be revealed with a slight shift of sunlight. We, too, are already full with enough sacred energy to complete our story. It takes the light of consciousness to reveal to us this fullness and our kinship with this moon that mirrors our becoming. A trip to the underworld releases more of this conscious light in us, if we allow it.
I’ve never lost my attachment to the moon. I still want to howl at her, am swooped up by her charm. She was mother to me when, for whatever reason, my own mother couldn’t. She was friend to me when, for whatever cause, my world simply wouldn’t. I often wonder if that wise head counselor who first mothered me so was really my moon come to hug me below.