Tonight, this morning, or however you want to describe the time of day when you haven't gone to bed yet but the moon is setting and the sun is rising. At that time, I was driving home from my friend's house.
She's one of my two best friends, or however you want to describe the friend that's seen you at your worst and your best, through decades of life - but always brings out the best in you. The friend who you can always be home with, the one who reminds you who you really are after the world tries to convince you otherwise or worse when you are behaving otherwise.
At that time, after driving home from that friend's house, I saw the big, pink, full moon, lying close to the horizon. It kind of looked like the sun, but wasn't. The sky was a periwinkle shade of blue, and there were very few clouds that kept it company. I took a picture but it was disappointing. Moon pictures never turn out as glorious as they look to you.
I thought of all the mystic connections to the moon, how it controls the ocean waves, how it controls women's cycles, and how heathens worshipped it. I thought of all the moon rituals forgotten and the moon rituals still practiced.
The new moon is meant to be a time to set intentions, to let go of what no longer serves you, while the full moon is a time to bring more of what you want in your life, of manifestation. And the moon being in the sign of Sagittarius, as it was this night, is to mean a time of adventure and exploration.
I don't know what you believe, it doesn't really matter, the point is the moon was in all its glory reminding me of the space that surrounds our little planet and how little we know about it. And how I had just spent the last eight and a half hours talking with that friend about other mysterious things we didn't know much about like humanity, hell and heaven, death, love, and fear.
She had lost her beloved dog weeks earlier, and in the immediate days after she asked "What was the point in getting a pet at all, if it felt like this after you lost them? What was the point?"
The death of a dog seems harder and simpler in some ways than that of a human because the relationship was so pure. It was simply love. Our pets never lashed out with hurtful words. They never demeaned us, there was no need to forgive and there was no regret for not forgiving faster.
Now, weeks later she and her husband decided to get another dog. "It sounds so cheesy, and people said it to me so many times. But the point is to love, that's the point of life. Life is love." And it hit me in a way those cheesy words I had heard in many variations before never had.
Love transforms every other emotion, kind of like the letter R after a vowel, changing the sound of what was before. Like how the moon alters the night sky and calls the waves to chase it.