How to Find the Moon

Beautiful lines from Katherine May and how they can reshape us

A brief interlude in your day. A coffee break together. For a moment. xoxox

---

As I got older, I noticed more about how she waxes and wanes, and I began to remodel her in my mind: perhaps she was just like me, sometimes round with power and sometimes dissolving into the sky, eternally shifting shape, restless.

—@Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age

The moon is solace, waning in the early part of this month in our wide prairie skies, glimmering still but narrowing. The words from Katherine May explain why looking up in the night gives us room to see ourselves differently. Reading this small revelation, this interpretation of the moon as reflecting of who we are in the cycles of our lives, opened me up. I was tucked up in bed, deep into Enchantment, but I paused.

I stepped out from the covers, tiptoed downstairs through the sleeping house, and slipped outside to the crisp, cool night so I could look up. The moon was waiting, caught in the branches of a nearby tree, steady.

Bare foot, just for a few moments because it was so cold, I paused on the outside stoop, standing on the chilled welcome mat, frozen bristles against my skin, thinking: Which phase of the moon am I today? Which phase are any of us? When are we round with power, oh, I love that, or dissolving into the sky?

#

A month ago, when I lay down in bed to read, a strange sound came from the back of the house. I got up to look, checking on the little boys, then went to check on my daughter. She’s twelve. She wasn’t in bed where I’d left her ten minutes before.

            Her pillows made a shape. But it wasn’t her. Instead, there was absence.

            I checked her room over, turned on the light, checked again, opening the cupboard door to discover dirty laundry but no daughter. Not. There. I went into the room that used to be my office, which became her room, which holds books until our youngest occupies it. The changing uses of the rooms, the shifts within a house, the disappearance of a not-quite-teen. She wasn’t by the books, curled up on the sofa. Not. There.

            A thrum of anxiety started in my chest. I searched downstairs, where her phone lay like an omen. Her shoes were gone. She wasn’t in the basement. Our oldest son has his room at the back of the basement. I knocked before barging in. His hair stuck up like a cockatoo’s as he sat in his bed. “Why would she be here, Mum?”

            More quickly now, I hurried up the stairs when Yann lay reading. I shook his shoulder and explained that our daughter was mysteriously vanished. It was odd, but not quite stressful. I couldn’t understand it, but maybe he could?

He performed the same search I did. Every room in the house. I texted her best friend. She hadn’t seen her anywhere. None of it made sense. Where does a twelve-year-old go from her bed? And when do you call the police? Twenty minutes had gone by: would we live in those twenty minutes forever? Dark stories surfaced, nasty creatures in my mind. Yann put on his boots, asking me, “You think she has her shoes on? Where would she go?” He stepped outside, under the moon, walked around the garden, then the garage, then around the street, shouting her name.

            For a final time, I checked her room, flipping between puzzled and rising terror. A strange sound again. The window. Opening.

She climbed inside like a cat. “Why are you guys shouting my name?” she asked.

            The flood of worry became rage became a pause. I’ve learned to pause in those big emotions, not to let them lead me. “Where were you?” I asked, steady on the outside, frantic inside, the full alarm bell far from quiet. Her eyes thrilled. The drama. The quiet answer in her new power:

            “Sitting on the roof, Mum. Looking at the moon.”

#

Amber Sparks over on

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Writing

writes in her lovely piece It’s Okay to Love The Moon:

There are a lot of things in this world that are a little wondrous, but only a small number that truly generate Big Wonder. Of course we should keep writing about them, and if we get them wrong sometimes, well, it’s no better or worse than writing a bad poem about potato chips, or about picking kids up from school.

My daughter, escaping in a small way through her window, sending confusion and then fear through her parents, was gazing at the moon, finding that Big Wonder. Perhaps she was seeing herself reflected, finding her cycle and rhythm, round with power, glimpsing herself in the vast skies. We kissed her goodnight and I lay in bed for a while, my hand on the place where my heart beats, resting on my chest, holding onto the new safety of the night, feeling my daughter pulling away.

#

My bare feet froze. But I stood on the stoop watching the narrow moon slipping from its cage of branches into the cold sky. Like my daughter, I’d slipped outside. Found wonder.

The dark nights spill into the mornings and evenings, my children grow older, change rooms, venture into the unknown. Restless. As they venture, they glimpse themselves reflected in the moon.

One night, not so far from now, their rooms will be empty. My daughter won’t be found coming into the window. She’s discovering her own waxing and waning. Her own power.

Remodelling the moon in my mind, as Katherine May so artfully describes, helps me see that the next phase for me is one of shadows. This dormancy is okay, it’s wonderous, even. For this brief cycle, it’s a season to close the doors, light the fires, cuddle up with my children. Hold close.

These expressions of wonder, of contemplation, of reflection, are what I need as I cycle through.

Maybe you do, too.

xoxox

Alice

Read more: Find

Katherine May

on Substack and read Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. I’d also recommend Wintering, her earlier book which is a warm blanket by a cozy fire for this time of year.

---

In case you’re new here! I’m Alice and I’ve published fourteen books, along with several secret books that I’ve ghosted. Recently, I’ve pivoted as a writer and I’m working on a crime novel for adults: read the opening here. I coach writing at The Novelry and I juggle kids and life and the river of great reads in the world!