Moon

might carry the most evocative combination of vowel and consonant sounds in the English language . . .

Mount Baker Super Moon. © Bodi Hallett

In the human imagination the earth might be where the sun illuminates everything we need to see and name, but the moon has always embodied the task of carrying the unnameable, and lives according to its own hidden urgencies, which in our daylight hours are forgotten or only half revealed.

MOON

might carry the most evocative combination of vowel and consonant sounds in the English language, calling us to imagine it’s round reflecting white orb, even as we say its ancient name; exerting its gravitational pull on our voice and our thoughts, as if emanating and emerging through the extraordinarily long sound that lives at the centre of that initial soft ‘m’ and the half spoken ’n’ that begin and end its passage through our mouths. Moon is an extraordinary word, equal to the astonishing celestial body it calls to mind: it is a word that carries the circular sense of subtle celestial change, representing that overwhelmingly sense of presence and part presence, presence and non-presence that the moon itself inhabits in our lives. The sound in the word moon is like the moon itself, coming and going while while giving a reassuring sense of being eternally present.

The moon sails forever, and has sailed for ever, through the dark sky that lives inside us as much as the night sky above our house. We have grown and evolved on this planet from the simplest cells to the extraordinarily complex creatures we are, in an intimate parallel with our waxing and waning satellite. Living on this earth has always meant living in an abiding, awe struck companionship with something both overwhelmingly close and too far away to control. We have always lived, half reverently, half resentfully, at the whim of that imaginative, physiological, psychological power we call the moon.