Hope through awe

Gratitude alert in late August

It’s been a tough summer as we know. Whether it’s smoke-filled cities and states (we have expanded past smoke-filled rooms, I see) or brutal and enduring heat waves in places known for respites from heat through most of our lives, or the arrival of hurricanes, just the weather has been tough. Then there is the political turmoil that is now the center of our lives in this country though it wearies. One party is not interested in governing while the other is what Oklahoma humorist Will Rogers claimed was not a party at all. The proceedings in courts for trivial and deadly serious reasons proliferate more rapidly than the assurances the Redskins—oh, right, the Washington Commanders—will recapture their glory from decades past. And we are merely 66.66% of the way through 2023 as of midnight tomorrow.

Yes, amidst the turbulence, distrust, and dangers, we retain some awe when it comes to nature. I am tickled pink to see the number of stories about the Blue Moon appearing this evening.

A blue moon is a phrase that I never really pondered until I heard about some other moon sometime last year. I think it was a Wolf Moon but no matter. The point is this is a phrase we use to denote something we find awe-inducing, extremely rare, and worth stopping the rest of our lives to capture.

The national security community went through this about a generation ago when conversations focused on ‘black swan’ events, those surprises that are simply not considered in planning for anything because they seem to unnatural or hard to fathom. I think the phrase was overused because most things are possible to anticipate but the overwhelming majority of the time we actually follow a somewhat predictable path in our analyses, regardless how much we tell ourselves otherwise. We probably should be saying low probability events rather than unnatural ones but that’s really a topic for another day.

I must note that I was rather startled when I actually saw a black swan last Saturday.

You never know what any day will bring.

The blue moon today, however, is something different. It’s a known phenomenon that simply occurs quite seldomly. The calendar in our modern era is quite predicatable so we know August has 31 days. We also know that full moons occur roughly every twenty eight days so most months have a single one. Pretty clear, predictable, and normal. The Greeks and lots of ancient cultures mastered this lunar cycle thing way back.

The blue moon (or another named moon, depending on the month and what is going on in life) is a second full moon within a single month. According to National Public Radio, they occur not really that rarely; blue moons occur roughly every 2.5 years. Not monthly nor even annually but more often than the cicadas spoil our outdoor lives with their seventeen year cycles which induce an annoying noise driving people crazy for about a month as they pay us a visit above ground. Blue moons certainly come more often than that.

This blue moon, however, is noteworthy for at least three reasons. It’s the second full moon of August as mentioned.

It’s also the last time that particular August lunar cycle will occur until 2037. Fourteen years from now the world will look how? That is a tantalizing question and one that spurs us to get abit giddy.

We love mysteries as humans. I suspect that the delicious sense of uncertainty is what fuels the centuries’ long obsession with conspiracy theories in so many places. It’s so much more fascinating to offer alternate visions, even if they are wacko as seems more common lately, than accept mundane answers in life. This blue moon becomes a good way to divert our thinking from the weariness we confront daily to something that engages us a bit more for a few moments.

Finally, it’s a super moon. As I mentioned just yesterday, we love big in this country. Big milkshakes, as the Annapolis deli Chick and Ruth’s offering 6 pound milkshakes (of course people successfully consume them, earning a tee shirt—natch), or things in the State of Texas that are always bigger if you listen to the Texans, or Yellowstone National Park as the largest volcanic caldera on the planet. That this blue moon is a super moon is bound to attract our attention.

What gives me hope from this, however, is the at least minuscule blip in excitement about nature it is creating. We don’t own the moon, even if India landed there only last week and Neil Armstrong and a select few of his colleagues walked there well over half a century ago. The moon still holds some mysteries. We have been on the surface but not below. We know a lot about the side facing us as the sun provides warms and light to show it off but less about the far side, less about the subsurface, and less about our interactions with that body historically.

We are not going to solve those questions tonight. But a lot of folks will cast their eyes to the heavens to observe this huge moon with its mysteries and its certainties. In an era of such profound cynicism, doubt, and anger, that moon predates each and every one of us and will last long past the same. We benefit from something helping us gain some perspective about ourselves and the current moment.

Some thoughts will return to the era I remember when we were so mesmerized that men did walk there. The July 1969 landing brought the world together in a way that seems unfathomable today yet it was the culmination of a national project. Even those adversaries we found so fearful paid us compliments for the achievements scientists wrought.

Or harken back to the Tom Hanks’ movie Apollo 13, a gripping tale of humans struggling to solve an honest life-or-death challenge for three men who had seemingly little control over failure after failure in a spacecraft hurling its way through space. Central to that movie was the tale of national pride and redemption, of course, but the moon loomed large as the cause of the mission, indirectly the reason for their possible deaths.

Tomorrow we will return to rebuilding Lahaina as Hawai’i holds its breath that dry conditions elsewhere on the islands don’t ignite comparable fires. We will also be one day closer to a confrontation over funding our government as required by law and common sense. We will begin to provide aid and comfort to those afflicted by the hurricane in Florida and Georgia. Other cyclones churn in the super-heated waters reminding us we would be lucky is this is the only bad one in this year’s Atlantic season. School kids in much of the country will settle into hot, sticky seats to watch high school football while those lucky few still enjoying their final days at the shore on the east and west coasts wrap up another summer season as we reach Labour Day this weekend.

Tonight is the moon’s show. It’s so encouraging that the blue moon still intrigues many us as a puppy fascinates an eighteen month old child similarly learning about the world. There is enough tough stuff that even a tiny bit of awe is a damned good thing.

I appreciate those of you who read this and I especially appreciate those who subscribe financially. Please feel free to restack or recirculate this or any of my columns to any of your friends or colleagues who might find the thoughts worth a look, I do appreciate it.

Be well, be awed. FIN