Angels Cranking the Cosmos
Tonight will see the rising of the first full blue moon, called blue (for some reason) because it is one of two in the same time period, August and September, the moon apparently having little use for monthly deadlines.
I’m making deviled eggs to take over to my friend Doug’s house; he lives more intentionally than anyone I’ve ever known. Single, middle-aged, with a full roster of experiences, he makes his living as so many people do here in Santa Fe with a patchwork of endeavors including care of elderly people and renting an apartment in his house to a series of long-term friends and taking those of us lucky enough to go along on weekend car trips to Canyon de Chelly and Chaco Canyon, both epicenters for early life in this area. Doug always includes an Indian friend to tell us what we need to know. I’m using the term “Indian” because that is what is used here.
A few months ago he participated in a city program to get to know the public buses; we have a herd of handsome, relatively new ones on which almost no one rides. Talking to the passengers and getting to know one driver well, he created a tapestry of the kind of transportation we all need to learn to ride. It’s not a coincidence that the Civil Rights movement began on a bus.
Doug sends out an invitation in advance to let his large circle of friends know to come to his house at 5 p.m. on each monthly full moon evening and to bring snacks, casseroles and cookies. It’s often quite a large group to pack into his small living room but somehow it all runs smoothly as we pitch in to set up and clean up. After we eat, Doug hands his large collection of drums, rattles, and rain sticks to his guests and we drum for an hour until slowly the sound dies down and we all head home. To me it’s a remnant of a past here that is almost gone.
My version entails turning over a big bright room and a garden to two groups of meditators on Sundays, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. These groups are sometimes quite large but how quiet it is, how peaceful, as eight or ten or twelve cars come to rest in my driveway. They don’t leave even a speck behind but a silent blessing that a friend understood I receive as well.
We need blessings. We live in difficult times.
As I look forward to the publication of my historical novel, Taken by the Shawnee, based on my ancestress’ 1788 experience, I am reminded that all lives are difficult; as Margaret Erskine adapted to the Shawnee who had killed her husband and her child, I began to understand something about the strength that can come to us through adversity. The turning point in Margaret’s four-year captivity in the Ohio County came not when she was adopted as a daughter by the chief, important as that was for her safety and welfare, but when she made close friends among the tribe’s women. Often described as hostile to white women captives, the Shawnee women taught her everything she needed to know to survive in camp and on the trail. I think she won them with her courage.
The excerpt from Wikipedia pasted below discusses the etymology of the term “blue moon:”
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The earliest recorded English usage of the term blue moon is found in an anti-clerical pamphlet (attacking the Roman clergy, and Cardinal Thomas Wolsey in particular) by two converted Greenwich friars, William Roy and Jerome Barlow, published in 1528 under the title Rede me and be not wrothe, for I say no thynge but trothe. The relevant passage reads:[10]
O churche men are wyly foxes […] Yf they say the mone is blewe / We must beleve that it is true / Admittynge their interpretacion.
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Once again, thank you James! Very interesting indeed…
Good to hear about Doug, our friend, too. We were in a writer’s group together for several years. A fine fellow. We met you at a Buddhist retreat at Jemez with Doug. Hope you’re doing well.