THE MOON'S PASSAGE

I didn't begin to appreciate the moon's power until I started sleeping in deserts without a tent. On moonlit nights I'd awaken many times, for a moment gaze at the moon, then immediately sleep again. I think we all must awaken often during the night, just that we don't remember unless something special is going on, like the moon being there.

During my desert sleeps the moon's brightness was extraordinary but what affected me even more was how each time I awoke the moon had progressed a little farther along its journey across the sky. By night's end my stop-action memory of the moon's passage imparted the impression that the movement had constituted a long, uninterrupted, hypnotic progression. The next morning I always felt as if the moon had wrought something significant inside me but I never had a clue about what kind of change it had been, and I still don't know.

If you sleep beneath the moon several nights in a row, the effects only intensify. One reason is that each night during the period of the moon changing from a new moon to a half moon, then to a full moon, its time in the sky lengthens. When the moon reaches fullness, she rises as the sun sets, thus gracing the sky the whole night, and her face is never as bright as at that very moment. Our anthropomorphic subconsciousness naturally interprets this as the moon being ever more attentive to things below her, ever more passionate about whatever and whomever she touches.

Margarita writes that when the man lopped the top off a male papaya tree on the third day of the new moon, eventually the tree turned female. It's understandable that the cutting would take place three days after the new moon because by the third night anyone can see that each night the moon is growing, spending more time in the sky and glowing brighter and brighter. All these details hypnotically suggest burgeoning changes at hand.

And, why wouldn't such a majestic passage of the moon occasion profound changes, and why wouldn't those changes be harmonious with feminine benevolence -- such as gorgeous papayas coming onto a tree starting out as male?

What a magnificent reality we find ourselves in when such a lovely, mysterious, powerful influence can be so commonplace that most of us don't even bother to know what phase the moon is in, or when and where to look for her.