mictlan

On the night of the full moon, I stayed up to watch the eclipse from my rooftop.

I have an ancient fascination with the sky. If I were to count all the hours I've spent skywatching, day and night, surely it would come to weeks of my life. In the last year, it has been my habit -on evenings that I get home early- to sit on my rooftop and lose myself in the clouds. There is a moment, looking up, when your perspective shifts, and the hair rises on the back of your neck, and you fall upwards. To stare too deeply into the sky is to become it.

Skies have flavours. Daytime's blue can be painful and pure, but it is only a mirror in the end, a dome that holds you in. On a cloudless night, the fall doesn't end until you look away.

I am named for the moon, but I do not love it; it brings too much light into my beloved dark. Too, they associate too much religiosity with the full moon, and ruin the quiet with their inane prayers. This time, for some blessed reason, they were silent and the wee hours peaceful.

(Sometimes I am glad that my foolish little city sleeps by night. When I was younger, I found this dead silence disturbing and needed it filled with white noise. Now I find that I prefer the deadness. Listening from above with your eyes closed, you can mark out a map of the world in whispers and distant echoes.)

A lunar eclipse in a cloudless sky is a mystery and a wonder. A wonder, for its rarity -not so much in actuality as in experience, mere circumstance robbing you off most of the eclipses of your life- for its starkness, for its echo of the greater rhythms upon which worlds turn. A mystery, again, for the same reasons and for others; most of all, perhaps, in that in its reflections and occultations we see our own.

posted by: mictlantecuhtli at 00:48 | link | comments (5) |

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