Thanks to the Moon

Thanksgiving is around the corner and thanks is in the air! This time of year, many things are in the air, such as excitement and love, but the end of November intentionally coaxes out thanks. I wanted to choose one thing for which I’m very grateful this year and showcase it as something deserving of great appreciation. If I’d chosen the beautiful Earth, my thanks would be grounded, but I’ve chosen the magnificent Moon, so my thanks is directed up into the air.

I’ll send it up as far as I can. After that, USPS will take it the rest of the way via contract with SpaceX in the form of my adoring letter below. Please read on if you need any inspiration for your own letter to the Moon, but why would you need that? Obviously, you’re bursting with thanks for the Moon.

Dear Moon,

You are inimitable. You are serene. You are massive, btw, and make our shores a daily oscillation. If you’ve been paying attention, you know I’m obsessed with you, head over heels. In human speak that means I’ll stop everything to watch you, and this (not going to lie) is problematic while driving.

Thanks for everything this past year. For watching over all of us while we made our way through a pandemic, which we are still doing. I know you hung there as a background salve on the nurses’ and doctors’ battered spirits. I know you made them cry desperately when they snuck out to the hospital parking lots at night and saw you there, when they were forced to accept that life was a harsh gift because it was absolutely exquisite but also a gasping mess in the building behind them. You broke their dam of emotion, and allowed them to turn around and walk back in. I can’t think of words to tell you what that means. You either know what I mean, or you are the most beautiful clueless rock that ever lived. Regardless, we hang our existence on you in quiet or terrible pauses. It’s one reason why my heart is yours.

Thanks for what you did for the elders among us. They had enforced isolation earlier this year, having to see their grandbabies through computer screens and family through windows. It wasn’t supposed to be like that when they agreed to grow old and take the helm of our species, but it happened, and you softened it for them. They saw you at night, through windows from wheelchairs, from beds, and they stitched you onto their long mental quilt of memories of you to make something meaningful out of the passing of time and its consistency. When time doesn’t make sense, or life, or the world, nevertheless you arrive, and we see familiarity. You are our constant.

Moon, you are so complex, but you never make me feel simple by comparison. Just reading the Wikipedia entry on you stupefies me, and I realize how much some folks know and how much I don’t. The one thing I know is that you haven’t changed since I gaped at you as a child at night. You were the only ferocious thing sitting full on the horizon who was also compensation for our frailty: you gave us strength. I understand it’s a symbiosis. We gave you Audrey Hepburn singing Moon River, which I believe is about you and a river who’s a huckleberry friend. I sang Moon River one thousand and three times to my sons when I tucked them in at night and gave them back scratches for the span of their early years. My voice caught most times when I sang it, and I can’t sing it anymore. Too many tears. I saw you in my mind all those years while I sat at the edge of their beds, rubbing their tiny innocent backs, imagining them one day floating down the years of their lives with you as their guide. I imagined correctly. Thank you.

Lately you’ve been a little cup, a waxing crescent, tilted to the side. I know what you’re holding. Understanding. You spill this out onto the world where it lands on our heads twice a month so that we’ll have a momentary check-in with ourselves to think deeper and wonder better. When we see you, we remember that we’re here, by virtue of you being up there, and this resets our cockamamie inner compass that’s apt to go haywire regularly, truth be told. Thus, you help us to locate ourselves. We notice you and put our mental harassments to the side. The hikers at night think deeply on you. The campers sit by their fires and imagine quietly under you. The night shift workers wander back to their cars and wind down under your influence. The homeless see something still there for them when you tilt your cup and pour compassion onto their outcast, tired heads. You teach us to notice.

But you’re also popping up around this place in the daytime. We see you sometimes in the morning on our way to work, or out the window while working. Your white faint partial body against the blue sky: a reminder that there’s something else there besides our hectic view of the day. You spark a fleeting recognition in us that our slice of this moment is part of something far bigger. It’s a miniscule brain shift which, who knows, might have a subconscious effect on keeping our two feet planted in the larger picture. We can use such a thing these days when so many twirling pinwheels of distraction flicker in our brains. You’re a soundless breath of peace. If we can be more like you. . .

Some days only half of you arrives here, rising out of nowhere to reflect half your splendor. You reach your crest in the night sky over the world’s two-sided mentalities, where it’s either one or the other, this way or that way. Even if we can only see half of you, you are a full circle beyond our eyes. You remind us that when there’s clearly only one side, in fact, beyond our own reality, there’s the other half of what can be true. Sometimes when you show up as only half, I try to see if I can discern the faintest outline of the other half of you. When I try hard, on some days, I can.

But of all things, Moon, at this Thanksgiving season, I appreciate that you are one of the reasons we care so much. You are hope floating in the sky on a 24-hour cycle set to keep the grandest of notions alive: there is reason for hope. Because of this, we continue to care. And our care is legendary. We are the caregivers for the dying and the sick, for the lonely and dejected, for the sorrowful and the lost. We are the folks working the tents in some ramshackle spots in the world, feeding those having walked away from the ravages of war and violence with no other game plan than that. We are the people vaccinating the planet, day after day, arm after arm after arm. We are the groups feeding the hungry and wiping the tears. We are the staff keeping the team together on a hectic and fiery project at work, some days with little to go on other than our own inner fortitude. We are the parents holding our worried kids. We are the first responders going back into the unknown every time because we have the determination to help others survive. We are the kind neighbors bent on spreading love. We are the selfless teachers trying to equip and support young souls. We are the folks who sacrifice more than seems possible for the safety of the homeland. We are the change-makers who trust there can be better. We are the folks who do countless different things to keep the species going, which is the center bean of all our hope. We do these things under your bright light, Moon, and then we watch you rise the very next day as proof that we’re on the right track. And maybe we’re not on the right track, but the sight of you gives a bit of hope that we can continue looking. At Thanksgiving, I will surely thank you for that.

This concludes my letter to you, my Moon. I thought about writing to you for many years, but I wasn’t sure you could read, and there wasn’t such a thing as a private rocket company. Today I’m just going to go for it, which has been my mantra lately, and hope that you receive this and will read it. You can always respond to this blog or email me. Or, if it’s more your style, just wink when you see me. I’ll be watching because I’m your biggest fan and love you to the moon and back. (That’s just a saying we have here.)

My appreciation,

Stephanie