Fullness

photo by altercator

Technically speaking, the moon wasn’t full—that, the internet tells me, happened at 2:22 in the afternoon.

But it was the night in this cycle upon which luna was fullest, so bright, eventually, that we stood around the backyard barbecue bathed in milk, our shadows sharper than they’d been in any daytime all week.

And I didn’t need no world wide web to tell me those concentric moondogs rippling out from our planet’s satellite like fried egg rainbows were a once-in-this-lifetime, anyway, phenomenon that all but made the cannabis-induced visuals superfluous, albeit enhanced.

You don’t have to ride lots of miles to go far on such a night; the ghosts of our Duwamish predecessors and even whichever later settler left us his chimney gather ‘round; Tim Burton does the set and when the music’s turned off and you can hear yourself think, you really don’t have to: all that’s required is a set of eyes to drink it in—well, that, and a six-pack of beer, a box of Duraflame logs, some lighter fluid, and three dozen or so of your old friends and new acquaintances out for a bike ride together, more or less.

“The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao,” says the ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao-Tzu, but, of course, everyone knows that; language fails to capture the totality of All; and you can no more put into words what such experience is really like than you can enclose God in a box. 

Suffice it to say, then:

And let the empty space speak for itself and remind you of spidery flames climbing the fireplace, clouds parting to reveal the smilingest Man in the Moon and his French rabbit counterpart gleaming like crazy, the soft ground underfoot, useless hills beneath your tires, and just how unlikely yet inevitable these scenes are.

I mean, really: the moon reaches fullness only once every 28 days; this shit I’m not talking about happens every week.