Once in a blue moon...

Two nights ago my yin and I, accompanied by a close friend, went to the beach at sundown to see the full moon come up over the ocean.  This is something we try to do as often as possible, but it generally works best when the full moon coincides with the weekend, one of those pesky compromises of the current life we're living. I remember years past when weekdays were differentiated from weekends by nothing more or less significant than an "s," and the idea of staying up an extra hour or two on a Tuesday night simply meant sleeping a little later, or lingering in bed a little longer while the coffee gurgled its way into the pot.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that this past Friday also happened to be a blue moon. According to librarians familiar with the Farmer's Almanac, a "blue moon" occurs when a season contains four full lunar cycles instead of the usual three. Popular wisdom, however, has conflated this original designation with a new, less infrequent event - two full moons in a single month.

 As an aside, I find it interesting that the blue moon has managed to sneak its way out of the Farmer's Almanac and into our broader society. This has been a great boon to brewers:

and country music starts alike:

But this is also beside the point.

The point is that something has always slightly bothered me about the establishment of the blue moon as a sort of post-industrial, new age, consumer brand. I've always found this concern difficult to articulate, but it is easily illustrated by what happened this past Friday.

My yin, our friend, and I were sitting on a bench, chatting, watching, waiting for the moon to break its way through the hauntingly beautiful haze of dusk.  It happened slowly, not at the point where sky meets water, but about 18° above the horizon. Not long after it emerged, a woman came running up the boardwalk that leads to the beach  with a cell phone in hand.  She stopped, snapped a picture, and then retreated back to her vehicle, which she had left running by the roadside. She was there, perhaps, 15 seconds.

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My yin and I returned to the beach yesterday, taking advantage of the clear weather, long weekend, and free early morning parking. As I sat journaling, it finally occurred to me how to articulate what I witnessed the night before:

"... It was odd because there were other people there as well, and I think to myself how curious it is that people make such a to-do out of two full moons in a Julian month, almost as it celebrating the capture of the cyclical, atemporal, natural cycle of the moon by the regimented, prescribed, artificial confines of our modern calendar, which is itself a futile, almost obscene, attempt to circumscribe time and nature into something we can control and measure...

Where did this come from, this victory of man's time of nature's? Is it rooted in obedience to the masculine sun over the ecstatic worship of the feminine moon? If so, what does this yearning for people to go to the beach, capture an image, then leave represent?  A repressed urge to return to the feminine? A subconscious urge for a time of ebb and flow that mirrors the menstrual and eschews the rigid, phallic time of Caesar?"

My yin, the beach and moonrise...