(Via grow this)

Posted by admin to Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mark Phillips, Sunrise, luncacy and Imagination, moonrise on 2008-02-01, 11:04:00

“I think the imagination is the single most useful tool humankind possesses. It beats the opposable thumb. I can imagine living without my thumbs, but not without my imagination.” From Ursula K. LeGuin, The Wave in the Mind.

I have just turned the first calendar page on February. 2008. The year is no longer young, and the moon is on the wane. I found a lovely website from the U S Naval Observatory that lets you calculate moonrise and moonset anywhere for the whole rest of the year.

This picture*, in impossible shades of imaginary sky-blue-pink, is real – but it’s not my sky. This is what the world looked like when the moon rose in New Zealand on March 5, 2004. I don’t remember what I was doing that day but, according to the website above, the moon rose in El Cajon on 4:45 on an waning winter afternoon, and set in the wee hours (05:45) of the next morning.

(* Photo by © 2002-8 Mark Phillips, used with permission. Check out his photo page. He’s got an artist's eye for color and an offbeat way of seeing everyday things differently.)

But imagination serves where memory fails. I now know that my westerly setting moon rose a while later in the eastern sky of Paihia, New Zealand. I don’t have to imagine what the world looked like that moonrise, because I have this picture.

Now, what good would such a picture do if you didn’t have an imagination to see the moon rolling around the sky like a marble inside a globe? What if you lacked the imagination to believe that all things are possible everywhere for a moment every morning?

Here’s what Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849 -1924) imagined about the magic of sunrise:
“One of the strange things about living in the world is that it is only now and then one is quite sure one is going to live forever and ever and ever. One knows it sometimes when one gets up at the tender, solemn dawn-time and goes out and stands alone and throws one’s head far back and looks up and up and watches the pale sky slowly changing and flushing and marvelous unknown things happening until the East almost makes on cry out and one’s heart stands still at the strange, unchanging majesty of the rising of the sun – which has been happening every morning for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. One knows it then for a moment or so” (From “The Secret Garden”)

(Via grow this)

Posted by admin to Piet Hein, luncacy and Imagination, moon phases on 2008-01-31, 10:25:00

“As things so very often are
Intelligence won’t get you far.
So be glad you’ve got more sense
Than you’ve got intelligence.”

Piet Hein

My imagination waxes and wanes with the moon, and sometimes it feels like sense and intelligence seem to ebb and flow inside me. Lunacy or imagination?

These nights, here at 32° 46'13" N, 116° 57' 22" W, the waxing moon is still only a part of itself. Each night, outside my bedroom window, it rises in the east a bit earlier, but still looks like an old woman haunted by loss. Yet when the moonrise finally creeps above the trees, the light seems distracted – perhaps by other planetary events beyond our view from earth – and not paying full attention to me below.

Of course, through the miracle of the interweb (sic), you can go Here to calculate your very own longitude and latitude.

The night is no longer young. Before the moon rises, night is lost in middle age. The shadow of pallid moonlight on the dew-damp stones outside the window makes each stepping stone look like it’s shrugging its shoulders. It looks like the preoccupied gesture a weary mom makes, brushing her arm past her tired face, in wordless reply to a persistent child needing attention.

The moon is a mere shadow if its former self. The first month of this new year is almost over, but the waxing moon promises there’s life after January. The phases of the moon usher in and out seasons. Not a blunt and banal four seasons, but more like 400. More than once a day, the whole world changes right before my eyes.

Take, for example, my back yard. My garden is like a river: I never step into the same garden twice. During the waxing moon, my imagination seems to swell, and I seem to have more sense. Then later, like the waning moon, I realize that while I may be better informed, I’m often none the wiser. So much for internet intelligence.

While it may be obvious to the point of banality, Seasons always return, but each is different. This winter may be similar to last winter, but it is not the same. And this waxing moon is smiling at me.

This post was inspired by a post from From Greeny at Sometimes You Get What You Need with a picture of a smiling moon...