Near the middle of the month in January of 2019 there was a super blood wolf moon.  A super moon is one that appears larger because it’s in the perigee of its orbit around earth, it’s actually closer; and, a blood moon is a moon in total eclipse that turns a rusty red color.

Those two things happened on the same night.

And a third thing. Because it was a January full moon, it’s nicknamed a wolf moon from olden times when ancient families were taunted by the nighttime howling of hungry wolves on the frozen perimeter of their village. Such a confluence of lunar events is rare, and yet that very event was shared among several million souls, happening in slow motion, close to midnight, and visible to the entire Western Hemisphere.

One of the players in this drama is sunlight that is, of course, eternally present. Less conspicuous is the shadow that is also always there beyond our earth. But where there is light, there is shadow. The “dark side” gets a lot of press. Taken together, however, the darker aspect of light is not a thing to be feared, only known. A lot of mental and emotional therapy techniques cannot proceed to health without “shadow work.”

When I was a kid, I once told my grandmother that I had a toothache. “Bite down on it,” she said. “It’ll quit hurting soon enough.” She did not tell me, aw, just ignore it, boy. She suggested I go with the pain and see didn’t it lead me out of it.

Hold this image in mind: At every second, even when the moon doesn’t prove it, earth has a shadow, a tubular shaft of darkness extending deep into space. The shadow goes almost a million miles (3.7 times the distance from earth to the moon) seeking validation from some celestial object before our umbrasort of fades away in an outer space night that’s darker than a shadow.

Truth, what is real, never changes, and cannot be threatened, is also often inconspicuous. But truth, sometimes called the light, extends infinitely and captures all of creation in its radiating path. It doesn’t play out in a million miles, or in a million years.

Truth is both light and shadow. And, shadow waits in the void to be discovered and validated by experience. Truth’s infinitely long shadow is patient until some insight is experienced, like a full and silver moon that finds the earth’s shadow, and yields to it’s presence. Then, moves back into the light.

My blend of religion doesn’t include petitionary prayer. It has been said that God knows what we need before we ask. I believe that. I didn’t need to incessantly tug at the hem of my grandmother’s dress to get her attention and remind her to remember what I need. She loved me and was always ready for me with her wisdom.

It has been said that we should go into a closet to pray. I also believe that.

In quiet solitude, then, I ask five questions. With answers to those questions, I have everything I need.

How should I see this? What should I do? Where should I go? What should I say, and to whom should I speak?

And God, being the God of both light and shadow, outside of time and fully aware of my needs, has already put the answer out there for me. I only have to move into its path.

96
Long shadows at night,
invisible in darkness.
Then a lamp comes on.

I have a friend who is rich. He’s almost a hundred years old. I dedicated my novel The Poet of Tolstoy Park to Ray. When he lived aboard his 42-foot Hinckley sailboat here in Fairhope, he was for me a guru, preacher-man, and best friend.

He told me many things that helped me see differently.

Like, if a thing will have no value a million years from now, he said, it has no value now, none at all. I told Ray, I get it. And I mentioned Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. He asked me to find a copy and bring it to the boat, he’d love to read it again. I did. And he read it aloud to us both. The poem perfectly echoed Ray’s comment and made it plain to see that only love in action has value a million years from now.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Ray also got a big kick out of reading aloud The Wonderful Tar Baby Story from Joel Chandler Harris. We’d sit in the cockpit of the Hinckley, sipping hot black coffee, and Ray would open his worn copy of the story and read it with big gestures of his arms and in different animated voices. He didn’t care that passersby on the dock would look sideways at the two of us.

And Ray loved questions. Love to ask them, loved to answer them. Once he asked me that if it was truly just as wrong to lust in your heart, that if thinking about it was the same as doing it, then if he thought about going to church was it the same as going to church? Then he gave a big belly laugh that startled the seagulls off the dock.

And one morning, with a fat pelican on a piling cocking its eye toward me as I stood in the companionway of the Hinckley, I asked Ray, “What is your most valuable possession?” Without hesitation he answered, “My mind’s ability to experience insight. An insight is an incredible thing. Forever valuable.”

Then he said this world is an illusion of individual perceptions. “Some people think a Hinckley is the best sailboat in the world. But not the man who owns a Swan. I am attracted to tall thin women. But Rubens liked big, full-figured women.” Ray told me that when Jesus said he’d overcome this world, he likely meant he’d come wide awake and saw all things clearly, without illusion’s biased preference.

Ray’s sailboat was named Illusion, lettered in real gold leaf in a graceful arc on that pretty wineglass transom. He said the thing wouldn’t be worth a nickel in a thousand years, but filling the heart with an afternoon’s sail would be forever priceless.

60
Moments of insight,
illusions vanish like dreams
when I awaken.

I can see only her shoulder,
sitting there, eyes closed, I guess,
hunkered down in this slow, steady rain. 
No roof, for her, 
no walls, windows and doors. 
From where I stand, 
out of the weather and dry, 
waiting for the teapot to whistle,
I wonder about her life, wet,
but free as summer thunder,
unbounded, but measured like a poet’s lines.
She will sit her nest,
this Red-Shouldered Hawk, 
built there with his help in the oak,
high up, and stick by stick,
without worry and wonder, or woe.
Even in an April storm, 
her reason is life, 
the warm eggs under her belly.