Moon mystery…

So, the moon did that thing she does – catching me by surprise. The sky was turning to twilight, and I realised that I had nothing for the dinner. So I threw on my coat, pulled on my boots and wrapped a scarf around my neck, and headed out to the shops. I had only walked a couple of steps from our front door, when I stopped… awe-struck.

As always, the camera in my phone couldn’t capture its magnitude; the milky spectacle of its presence hung low in a rose pink sky. But I snapped the shot anyway, dissatisfied by how small the moon seemed in my photograph, compared with how it appeared to me in the sky.

The moon is like that, isn’t it? Always showing up in the sky when we least expect it – the changing shape of its luminescent form causing us to stop and take notice. And then, when we try to take a photograph to capture the glory, the wonder of it, the equipment fails us. The lens of the camera not coming close to the lens of the eye.

Or perhaps, that’s not it at all… Perhaps it’s more that it looms so large in our imagination, that we see it so much larger than it appears through something so coldly objective as a camera.

There is some truth here, I think – that the mystery keeps us on our toes, dancing through us, singing through the chambers of our heart. And that mystery? Well, it’s not going to be captured through a realist aesthetic. To truly do the mystery justice, we must withdraw our investment in trying to capture it in an illusory attempt at objectivity, that dissatisfies us through all the ways it fails to measure up to our own personal experience of the moment. Instead, we must bring the full weight of our subjective perspective to bear upon the places where we meet the mystery. The intimate edge where we meet and merge and withdraw and then move to meet once more.

Like kisses between lovers drawn to the taste of the other.