Wolf Moon
Full moon diaries
January now and the moon and Jupiter dance their celestial dance. Locked eyes, circling, gliding, gravitating closer.
I see more stars in Streatham than I ever did in Manchester, Orion lives in the flat above mine. But the moon tends to evade me here. In Manchester, the moon was my guide. These days it stays behind me, like a parent letting go of the bike. But not in January.
Last year, I saw the waxing moon try to swallow Saturn whole. I watched all month as four planets organised themselves in perfect harmony: Saturn, Mars, Jupiter and Venus, pulled taut along a cosmic tightrope. Amazing in the truest sense of the word. Rapt with solipsism I walked beneath them, looking and then seeing and then one day, understanding. Satori. Everything was at once so clear and yet just out of reach. Real but intangible.“Brief but timeless”.1
But it is always fleeting. In The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley posited that “the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system” stops us from seeing things as they really are, a basic survival instinct. It does us no good, biologically speaking, to have unmitigated access to anything other than the “measly trickle” of consciousness that is filtered through the reducing valve, down from eternity. But sometimes the valve becomes loose, either spontaneously or by deliberate practises. For Huxley, it was Mescaline; for me, on that day last January, it was the sky.
Briefly, it’s there, that ineffable clarity'; as Huxley put it, the “‘obscure knowledge’ that All is in all – that All is actually each.” And then, of course, it is gone. As the brain strives towards regular programming, there is no use trying to cling on.
There it remains, just out of reach, until it is your turn to glimpse it again.
Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception