The Moon Over the Gate

Fluorescent lights.  Halogens.  Energy-efficient LED's.  Even incandescent bulbs.  When I go to the hardware store to purchase some light bulbs, I'm offered a mind-numbing selection.  What kind of coloration do I want?  If I can figure it out, I have myriad choices, ranging from icy white to imitations of sunlight to traditional warmth.

"The Harvest Moon"

Despite all that variety, there is one type of light that people in cities rarely experience today.  It is what a love song in the early 1900's called "the light of the silvery moon."  All the artificial lights of our cities, although making life safer in some ways, prevent us from enjoying full moonlight. That is unfortunate because moonlight is a form of illumination that people have considered to be a nearly transcendent experience.

I did once experience totally undiluted moonlight.  It was when my wife and I went to one of the star-gazing "parties" held at the isolated McDonald Observatory in remote west Texas.  Our ability to observe stars through the two small telescopes set up for the public was impeded by there being a brilliant full moon.  What interested me more than the stars was walking about outdoors using the illumination of nothing but the moonlight.  And how strange that light was!  I can only describe it by saying it was as white in coloration as a halogen, while at the same time being as soft as still air.

Given the uniqueness of that light, it is no wonder that writers down through history have seen moonlight as an aid to coming to a transcendent awareness.  Frequently, it is depicted as a transcendence that returns us to a state of feeling being loved in a way we forgot about.  For example, take this poem by the 8th-century Chinese Li Po:

"So bright a gleam on the foot of my bed --

Could there have been a frost already?

Lifting myself to look, I found that it was moonlight.

Sinking back again, I thought suddenly of home."

The moonlight is so strange that Li Po does not recognize it at first, mistaking it for frost.  And yet, it brings him back to a place expressive of being loved -- "home."

Experiencing moonlight thus becomes a passage into a kind of transcendence.  Such movements into transcendence are sometimes expressed by poets' using some symbol for an opening. Thus, it might be a symbol such as a window, through which the moonlight enters, and through which the poet's heart can be transported out beyond its ordinary limits.

Another symbol for opening -- a gate -- is employed by the 8th-century Zen Buddhist writer Yung-Chia Ta-Shih. In his poem, he suggests that the greater consciousness the soft moon brings can not only make us feel more loved, but also make us be more loving.  Some key lines from his poem have been translated in this way:

"One moon is reflected in every expanse of water.

Every reflected moon is the one moon....

The great gate of love is wide open."

~~~

Have you ever experienced how brilliant soft moonlight can be?  Where was that?

(The Li Po poem is from The Jade Mountain, by Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu, translators, © 1929.)

(The excerpt from the Yung-Chia poem is taken from Blue Mountain:
 A Spiritual Anthology Celebrating the Earth, ed. F. Lynne Bachleda, © 2000. p. 88.)

I’m Not a Car

"The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside,

 somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature and God.  

Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and

 that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature."

It's not that remarkable a statement.  What makes it so remarkable, and poignant, is knowing whose words they are:  They are words from The Diary of Anne Frank.  They are the words of a teenage girl who would never be able to go freely outside again, her Jewish family having hidden themselves behind an upstairs wall in a neighbor's house so that the Nazi's would not arrest, imprison, and execute them.

The family chose to try to escape death by imprisoning themselves -- by forcing themselves to never go outside.  Anne Frank's diary entry, however, expressed how deadly it was to the human spirit not to be able to go outdoors.  No -- that's not quite what she has done.  She has not expressed it in negative terms but in positive terms!  Her words are not a lament but instead a celebration of the wonderful benefits that can result from going outside.

Unfortunately, many U.S. cities today are not as congenial to the restoration of the spirit Frank describes as they might be.  (The twentieth-century author Albert Camus once complained that he would feel at home in the city if he were a car.)  Some cities are trying to make improvements, however, under pressure from joggers, walkers, bikers, and people with dogs, which rejoice even more in the word "out."

outside Franks' hiding place today

But what will I find when I do go out?  What will I do, and see, and think about as I take a walk? Will my mind still be chewing on the worries I had indoors?  Will I be focused just on the concrete and cars, or will I take time to look about and see a bush blooming or a bird flying up into a tree?

Will simply taking a walk be sufficient to cure what ails me?  Will a walk be enough to enrich me?  Or do I maybe need to find a place where I can quietly sit in order, as Anne Frank says, to be "quite alone with the heavens, nature and God... amidst the simple beauty of nature"?

Yes, we do need an awareness of Nature for our spirits to be fully enriched.  Because, as the environmentalist Bill McKibben observed:

"We live, all of a sudden, in an Astroturf world, 

and though an Astroturf world may have a God, 

he can’t speak through the grass, 

or even be silent through it and let us hear."

~~~

Do you have a favorite place to be outside?  What is it like?

(The Frank quotation is from  The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, © 1972.)

(The McKibben quotation is from The End of Nature, by Bill McKibben, © 1989.)
(The second photograph is used under a GNU Free Documentation License.)