Searching for a Blue Super Moon

and finding something else instead

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose, a community for sharing stories. I am including a theme song for this week’s post. “Share the Moon” by Indigo Girls. Speaking of sharing, if you like what you read here, please do share with a friend, and please stick around and share your own stories in the comments. I pose questions every week, but you can also just introduce yourself and tell us what you are reading right now. I just finished Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, so expect more on that in a future pocket. Finally, to my secret subscriber who shared a brand-new copy of Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things with me and told me I could get all the burrito juice I want on it, I love you. Thank you!

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash

It is the last day of August, and the kids and I are on a mission to see the moon. We have seen the moon many times at the lake and at home in the city. We have seen blue moons and supermoons, but I’m not sure we have ever seen a blue supermoon. According to Seabass, this blue supermoon is bigger and brighter, but I can’t find any evidence that this is actually true. I think it might be Tik Tok hype. If you can shed some moonlight on this, please do.

A blue moon is when two full moons occur in one month. This happens every three years or so. A supermoon is when the moon is unusually close to the earth. Supermoons occur a few times a year. But a blue supermoon is rare. According to NASA scientists, and a Tik Tok video Seabass saw, the next supermoon won’t be until 2037. “You want to make sure to get outside,” Tik Tok guy shouts, “because you might not be around to see the next one.”

“I think they’ll be around, Mama,” Seabass says upon hearing this. “I don’t think he has any subscribers over the age of 80.” Still, Seabass doesn’t want to miss this moon.

“I am not sure he has any subscribers over the age of 25,” I say. Still, I also do not want to miss this moon. So mid-week, after work and soccer practice, we take a field trip to the lake. We drive through the sunflower fields at sunset. Just last week, it was a spectacular sight, thousands upon thousands of blooms stretching through the sky. But now, most of the sunflowers are spent. Because it is cloudy, there is no sun on the verge of slumber. Usually at this time of evening, the sky is a mix of pink, purples and oranges, but today it is just gray. There is the hint of clearing as we near the lake, just enough for our hope that we might see the blue supermoon, to stay alive.

After dinner, we go outside on the porch to look. We hear hundreds of crickets, but the moon is quiet. We see nothing. We walk from the back of the house to the front, even though we know this is not how the moon works.

We shoot for the moon, and we miss. Tonight, she is hiding behind a sea of clouds. I love the virtual encouragement of the Tiktoker. I really do. I think that it is great that he is telling his subscribers, who I imagine are mostly 13-year-old kids, like my son, to go outside. I love that he has made my son care about the blue supermoon. I love that he has in some ways inspired our field trip. But he has also applied some pressure. Seabass is saddened that the moon is nowhere to be found tonight. He fears he is missing out.

I read an article on the moon in our local newspaper as I was planning for our trip. Roberta Simonson, a writer for the Spokesman, interviewed Nicole Moore, a physics professor at Gonzaga University. Nicole’s take on the moon was much more chill than our Tik Tok friend. It will be quite lovely, she basically said, but if you don’t get to see it, it kind of looks like a full moon, and you will have plenty of chances to see that. Plus, Thursday, it won’t be completely full, but it will be close enough. You might not even notice it’s not full. In other words, it will be good enough. I have been reflecting on enoughness lately, so her comment resonates. Plus, she says, if you can’t see the moon, it’s because of the clouds and that means “the rain is doing other good things for our region,” a sentiment I can get down with.

My friend Celeste wrote a poem reflecting on enoughness, where she declared herself good enough. She writes, I’m “tired of using that old measuring tape to measure that infernal gap between me and the ideal I’ve set for myself. Scales and measuring tapes are cheap. It’s self-acceptance that’s scarce. I’m hereby retiring from self-improvement plans. Consider this my two-weeks’ notice.” I encourage you to read the whole poem here.

I was hoping for a night of blue supermoon watching, for a super kind of night. We would pull out the telescope and put our phones away. We would be lost in the galaxy, but it doesn’t quite work out like I had planned. Our night is not super. It is pretty ordinary as far as Wednesday nights go. My kids and I make dinner together, but their phones are more present through the course of the evening than I would like. I’m starting to realize as I get older and as they get older that my suggestions don’t always land, that they want autonomy to choose. I worry because there is so much distraction in the world. I don’t want them to get lost. I don’t want them to miss things, but then I realize, I also don’t want to be like the Tiktoker. I want to be more like Nicole and Celeste. I want to offer my kids an invitation and let them know that if they miss this opportunity, there will probably be another chance. I want to tell them it will be okay.

We don’t see the moon on Wednesday night. We also don’t see it Thursday night because the clouds stick around, but on Wednesday morning we wake to a clear sky. There is a slight mist over the lake, and it looks as pretty as a picture. In fact, it looks like the picture on the cover of Mary Oliver’s book A Thousand Mornings which I have read repeatedly over the course of 1,000 mornings. I pick up my book and flip through the pages to see if Oliver has anything to say about seeking the extraordinary. I find this.

Today

by Mary Oliver

Today I’m flying low and I’m

not saying a word.

I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.

The world goes on as it must,

the bees in the garden rumbling a little,

the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.

And so forth.

But I’m taking the day off.

Quiet as a feather.

I hardly move though really I’m traveling

A terrific distance.

Stillness. One of the doors

into the temple.

On this new morning, I ask Seabass if he wants to go for a walk and swim with me. He doesn’t really want to. It is a chilly morning, for August, after the rain. He comes with me though. He borrows my hoodie and jokes that if you have to put on a hoodie, it probably isn’t swimming weather. I tell him how when I was a kid, we went swimming in the summer regardless of the temperature, even when it was rainy and cold. “Even in lightning?” he smirks at me.

“No, we didn’t swim during thunderstorms,” I say, smiling at him.

On the way down to the lake, I tell Seabass about the kind of stillness I want him to experience. The kind of stillness Oliver speaks of, where there is not the background noise of you tube and Tik Tok, of the news, of the noisy world, where instead there is only the sounds of crickets, geese, and quiet moons, the kind of stillness that separates us from the superficial and connects us to something deeper.

I don’t know if he fully understands what I am talking about. I don’t know if I fully understand what I am talking about, but he humors me as we walk to the dock.

When we get to the dock, I can’t help but think about Mary Oliver again, as the wild geese have clearly been here, as have the seagulls. Seabass and I have never seen anything like it. The dock is covered in bird shit. We tie Cato to the very end, so she won’t eat any of it, and then we have to walk gingerly to the ladder on the other side of the dock to avoid stepping in it.

It is again, not quite what we imagined, and yet I find a voice inside me celebrating over this wild spectacle. I imagine all the birds landing here, beneath a hidden moon, taking a moment to gather together before moving on to something else.

“Gross,” Seabass says as he climbs out of the water and towels himself off, the towel resting on the ladder handles, the one spot of the dock free of shit.

We carefully walk back to Cato, sidestepping the gifts of the geese, as if they are landmines and then we wash our shoes off in the lake one more time, just to be certain they are clean.

“Totally gross,” I agree.

I am going to close out this week’s pocket with a poem I wrote. I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What is your favorite Mary Oliver poem? What are your thoughts about stillness? What did you go looking for, and what did you find instead?

Nothing Much

On my weekday morning walk with Cato

I pass my neighbor’s house

The little yellow cottage with the blue oval door

Through the window, I can see him

sitting in his red cushioned chair

reading his morning paper with his feet up

His fingers embrace his white coffee cup

which seems to embrace him back

I am jealous of all the nothing that is happening on the other side of the window

Yesterday, my yoga teacher tells me to be still

to feel what nothing feels like

so I can find it later when I need it

I wonder if I can do this

if I can close my eyes and return to nothing

toss my head back, put my feet up, and let it embrace me

I wonder if I can dare to love myself like that

Four days later… My phone can’t capture the magic. It is most certainly good enough.