The Moon Cycle March 2, 2020

In late September I headed to Morocco for a yoga retreat, run by one of my beloved yoga teachers at Point Reyes Station.  When she had mentioned that two slots had opened up at the last minute, I thought – Morocco, why not?  It’s on my bucket list, after all.  I had just finished architecture school, “retired” in earnest, and ready for an adventure.  For once in my life, free of all commitments, I could act spontaneously.

The retreat was held near Essaouira on the Atlantic Coast, in a beautifully furnished, capacious stone house.  The deck greeted us each morning with an array of pink yoga mats, white cotton cushions, and large sun umbrellas.  Lunches were on the patio, afternoons spent lazing around in the green-tiled pool with book in hand or going into town.  Evenings brought lectures under the stars, and in one of these, our teacher presented the idea of fostering creativity by tapping into the moon cycle. The idea, she said, is to use the new moon as a starting point, to build up steam on a project until achieving maximal flow on the full moon, and then to reap the benefits of the exploration in the waning moon. 

I was immediately struck by the wisdom of this challenge.  First, the moon cycle is long enough so that one might actually accomplish something if one puts one’s mind to it, but not so long as to lose sight of the target.  Second, the moon offers a tangible reminder each day of where one is in the cycle – “Oh, now is the first quarter, I’d better get a move-on!”  Third, and this is really the woo-woo, maybe there is actually something extra magical or powerful about accompanying the moon on its journey, befriending it, partnering with it.  OK, as I said, woo-woo.

Since I’ve returned, I’ve tied my energy to the moon cycle twice, and I’m now convinced of its merit. I confronted the new moon on October 27th with a determination to whip my long-ignored garden back into shape.  I called my landscaper of twenty years ago; fortunately he was still in business and ready to dig in immediately.  Concrete and wooden risers were replaced.  A cobblestone retaining wall was extended. Trees were pruned, or removed, or planted.  Wisteria and rose bushes were humbled, and new drought-resistant stuff with unpronouncable names was planted.  By the new moon in November, the project was completed.  OK, I did none of this myself, except pay for it, but it was a test case of what is possible if one commits to moving forward in a timely manner. 

For my second moon project, I will take complete credit, and here, I shocked even myself.  When my daughter Annie was growing up, I used bound lab notebooks with gridded lines as the substrate for her scrapbooks.  I would lovingly glue in photos as well as other little memorabilia and embellish them with some kind of commentary.  These volumes, so precious to her and to me, had been abandoned in 2009, during the fall of her sophomore year in high school. In retrospect, there were two reasons for this abrupt ending:  first, Annie became a rebellious teenager and our relationship was deteriorating, and second, this was the year we moved from film to digital cameras, so no longer were there actual photos to pop into the book.

On the new moon of January 24^th I began the lunar project, with the intention to fill in the ten-year gap in “Life with Annie”.  This meant three things:  First, I had to sort out a decade’s worth of digital photos.  Though I had lost a few years of photos because of a computer crash circa 2010, I managed to assemble everything I had from cameras, iphones, and external hard-drives into one database of 17,000 photos, collated and duplicates eliminated.  Of these, over several days I selected 454 for printing.  Luckily, Walgreens happened to have a 9-cent per print sale, so I uploaded the lot and voila, within a few hours the 4X6 photos were ready for pickup at my neighborhood store.

Second, I needed some supplies. I ordered a dozen gluesticks from Amazon.  Years of keeping a lab notebook had taught me that only UHU sticks from Germany are up to this task, and Amazon got them to me within a day.

Third, the biggest challenge in the whole process was an emotional one.  In order to fill in a narrative, I had to go back through my journals of ten years, delighting in the joyful entries as well as writhing in the overwhelmingly painful ones, and somehow bucking up to enter commentary into the books. 

And, I made it!  With even a week to spare.  This will be a hard act to follow.