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A Halloween moon
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Halloween moon
This is a blog post I wrote a year ago tonight. It was just some thoughts on the then-approaching election, the economic meltdown, and all the anxiety people were just beginning to experience. Looking at it again today--exactly a year later--I thought it seemed just as relevant as it did then. Enjoy!
Need a break from the gloom and doom of the coming Great Depression II? Me, too.
Tonight's full moon was definitely a "Halloween Moon." I live out in the country, far from the city lights. The moon was bright enough tonight to cast a shadow and light up the whole yard. Beautiful. Halloween is a fun holiday where I live. We take my kids trick-or-treating in a nearby town that is a slice of Americana straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting.
The evenings are cool and clear, but there are still frogs and crickets chirping in the nearby woods. Low hanging ground fog swirls around like something from a horror movie. The corn fields have been plowed down and the remaining brown stalks bristle against the night air. We have bats out here. You see them in the evening chasing down mosquitoes and other insects. And always, to my horror, are the big garden spiders that have grown to their full creepiness, stringing their long wispy webs from tree to tree. As I walk around the house in the dark at night, I often keep one hand up in front of my face as an "early warning" sensor to alert me to an unseen web.
I always lived in the suburbs and the commercial symbols of Halloween were just that--commercials. Now, out here in the hinterlands, my wife's uncle grows pumpkins on his farm and he gave us a big one that sits out on the front steps. I realize now, from living here in the country, the awe and mystery of the season as "Mother Earth" has given us her fruits and prepares to go to sleep. I look at the mist and the moon and the bats and the cobwebs and I feel a connection to the earth and its rhythms. What a beautiful season it is!
As the world experiences weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over the financial crisis, there is a feeling of stillness and absolute unawareness of that here when I look at the Halloween moon. The rustling leaves turning brown, yellow, and red don't seem to care. The cricket outside my bedroom window doesn't seem to notice. The fall will be glorious regardless of what the markets do. Winter will oppress for a time, but spring will return. Summer will return to the Eastern Shore and it will "steam" us in its humidity in a way that can only occur with the Chesapeake Bay on one side and the Atlantic Ocean on the other. And when that season will pass, there will be another autumn, another October, and another Halloween moon to shine on my backyard, my crickets, my bats, my cobwebs, and my pumpkins.
Perhaps the solution to all of our ills is to get closer to these natural cycles and get back in tune with the person God created us to be. He created Adam in a garden. Perhaps that tells us something about where we are all supposed to be and what would give us the greatest happiness.
Here's wishing you all a happy and safe Halloween!
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