What does it mean to start a whole new decade off with a "blue moon?" Perhaps "once in a blue moon" we get a "do over." A fresh start.
Lao Tzu wrote of a vision he had in which he traveled to the World's very beginning. There, he saw Yin. Female energy. If I could have gripped his silk jacket and floated with him into that dark space, what would I have seen?
I imagine it may have looked something like this. One Vermont morning the fog settled in and my friend Bob Frenier took his camera out for a closer look. Out of nowhere crystals appeared on every surface of every branch of every tree.
Lao Tzu said everywhere he looked, the world was filled with "motionless grandeur."
Then Lao Tzu saw Yang--"rampant in its fiery vigor." As he put it, earth's quiet grandeur reached up to heaven's fire--maybe a blue moon kind of fire--and "the two penetrated one another, were inextricably-blended and from their union the things of the world were born."
A new year began with a blue moon in 1990 and a year won't start with a blue moon again until 2028. Because our solar calendar and our lunar calendar don't quite mesh, a solar year winds up with 11 extra days. Like Baba stacking up pretzels, they pile up until every two or three years we have an extra full moon. For some reason, we've taken to calling it "blue." Some think it's because when the volcano Krakatoa erupted in 1883, the moon actually was blue for something like two years.
For whatever reason, blue moons are like that crystalline Vermont winter morning when the whole world became--at least until the sun burned it off--a fairy land of white potential.
We welcome our new decade, pulsing up out of the dark into the quiet saying,
"Make of me what you will."
Your entry of today is beautiful, not least because it blesses my new year and speaks to my heart.
New Year's Eve found me on my mothers front stoop north of Chicago, gazing at the full moon through a web of bare birch branches and wondering at the way that it illuminated the icicles hanging from her eves. Your words and images reminded me of the magic of that moment. Thank you.
I look forward to continued inspiration in 2010.
Winona Fetherolf, Albuquerque, NM
Posted by: Winona Fetherolf | January 04, 2010 at 10:33 AM