Full Moon

I know scientists have debunked the theory that a full moon affects human behavior, but tell that to a poet or to anyone working in an ER or anyone with kids and they'll say the scientific proof doesn't matter. People go batty in the hours surrounding a full moon and maybe science just hasn't figured out the right way to explain it. And would it even matter if they could? It's no question the moon affects the ocean's tides--but aren't our own bodies comprised of 58% of water, and even more than that in children. We carry an ocean inside us. When the full moon presses down on us with more gravity than usual how could it not stir our biological processes? And beyond that is the fact that what we see around us becomes a part of us. To look at the moon then is to bring it inside and everything has its own energy. Perhaps even images we bring to mind carry their own kind of weight that unfurl in our bodies. Perhaps we carry around the essence of everything we've seen.

I was thinking about this phenomenon last week--before I even knew that the supermoon would be appearing over this weekend--for the simple fact that my kids were driving me nuts. They were like tiny bats stuck in a box--flickering about, unsettled, cagey, extra rowdy. My first thought--a full moon. And I remember a time some months ago when both kids kept tripping over the tiniest things. It was preposterous how often they fell down over the course of that week and I told a friend that it was as if the earth was off its axis. Their reply to me was that it was. It was strange and comical to witness the difference in my kids' stumbling feet--to think how something so vast and inconceivable as the world could manifest itself in something as small as a child's gait. A phenomenon so small one could put it in their pocket. I've never had a brain for science because I think beauty isn't meant to be calculated and measured but felt and wondered about. I'll take the metaphor over the numbers.

In honor of the supermoon, here's one of my favorite passages from a moon poem (titled "Returning From an Artist's Studio" by the great Stephen Dunn):
"Late at night in my own life / I see fireflies scintillating a field / and a fullish moon up there working / on its reputation, which I thought / was secure. And though I'm not one / to stop my car for beauty / I stop, get out, begin to understand / how the first stories winked / of another world. It's as if / I'm witness to some quiet carnival / of the gods, or the unrisen dead / speaking in code."