March 17, 2022 The Moon in Full Worm Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. VINTERNATT BY NIKOLAI ASTRUP, LICENSED UNDER CC BY SA 4.0. What is the moon? The moon is a natural satellite, and it reflects the light of the sun. The moon is 4.5 billion years old. The moon is, on average, 240,000 miles away from this Earth. The moon is the fifth largest of the 210 that swing around the planets in this solar system, and the second densest, after Jupiter’s moon Io. The moon is made of iron and nickel at its heavy metal core; lighter crystals of solidified lava, like olivine and pyroxene, make up its mantle; and the lunar soil that makes up the surface crust is an even lighter mix of minerals and metals known as regolith, including anorthositic plagioclase feldspar, dusty and granular. Leave a footprint in it. The moon would be 73.5 million metric tons if it were placed on a bathroom scale on this earth. The moon is whisking at an average orbit velocity of almost 2,300 miles per hour. The moon is 6,800 miles around at its equator, and would that there were a hole big enough, about 50 moons could fit inside this Earth. The moon is the only non-Earth place human feet have stepped, and it has felt the weight of 12 bodies on its surface. O geometry of light. Read More
February 17, 2022 The Moon in Full Hunger Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column, The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. The Large Figure Paintings, No. 5, Group 3, Hilma af Klint, 1907. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. I In a driveway in San Jose, California, faded winter sun shone off the waxy tongues of the biggest jade plant I’d ever seen. The person I was with, whose mother’s heart had stopped four days before, unloaded things from a rental car. His stepfather, who I’d been warned was “a strange man,” pulled in behind us, back from collecting his wife’s ashes. He walked over with a cardboard box, anonymous and regular as any box you’d see on a doorstep, and stood by his stepson, holding this box. The man hefted the box in his hands and said, in a tone I cannot describe as anything other than merry, “You wouldn’t believe how much your mom weighs stripped of water and bodily liquid.” Something exited the person I was with, as though his bones had changed density, and he leaned back into the trunk of the car. The stepfather started to speak again—“Or fluid is the word, isn’t it, bodily fluid, blood and …”—and I moved toward him, opened the door to the kitchen, and held it for him. “Here,” I said, and he walked through it and the door swung closed and through the plexiglass I watched him place the box on the kitchen table, next to a bowl of persimmons and a bouquet of white carnations neighbors had sent in sympathy. Read More
January 18, 2022 The Moon in Full Wolf Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column, The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Strange Flower (Little Sister of the Poor), by Odilon Redon, 1880 1. How did you hear about planet Earth? Read More
December 17, 2021 The Moon in Full Long Night Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Harald Sohlberg. Månesskinn (Moonlight), 1907. Photo © O. Vaering, Norway The birds have gone. Off to pull worms from softer earth, drawn by the magnetic force alerting them each year to leave. Their shadows slid across the fields, reflections shivered over the dark surfaces of rivers and ponds. Each month has flown away, leaving a year’s worth of shadows and reflections on the surface of the mind. We’ve landed in December. Night is at its longest now. Read More
November 19, 2021 The Moon in Full Beaver Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. Not long ago at the big museum across the river, a little lost, I ended up in the Egyptian realm. I entered a closet-size space, its high limestone walls carved with hieroglyphs. Vultures, tall dogs, fish, bare feet with high arches, serpents, urns, owls, half-moons, eyes. These symbols, familiar and unfamiliar at once, arising, like all symbols, all myths, all language, out of our confusion and our fear, our grasping for sense and pattern, our wonder. “Wonder is ignorance that is aware of itself as ignorance,” Robert P. Harrison writes in an essay called “Toward a Philosophy of Nature.” Standing in the museum, I felt the charge, the fluttering, stirring hush that certain places bring when you can sense a long-gone presence—not ghosts, exactly, but some residue of human energy and effort. I felt the hands with their chisels, the dust and pressure, and line by line the shapes coming into being. Rising up those walls, the signs of our inexhaustible efforts to understand and make ourselves understood. Read More
October 18, 2021 The Moon in Full Hunter’s Moon By Nina MacLaughlin In her monthly column The Moon in Full, Nina MacLaughlin illuminates humanity’s long-standing lunar fascination. Each installment is published in advance of the full moon. The Wild Hunt of Odin, by Peter Nicolai Arbo, Nasjonalmuseet Summer is dead. The last flames of its cremation heat the leaves across New England where I live. The rest of the fire-stained leaves will fall, ashy on the forest floors, ashy on the sidewalks. This is how ghosts speak, the sound of ashy leaves blown by wind or shuffled by feet, and October is when they speak the loudest. Ghosts are white in the imagination, pale blurs, small fogs of body. The moon is also white, but no one thinks it a ghost. For this haunted moment of the year: the Hunter’s Moon. Bare trees, bare fields—all the better, by moonlight, to spot the prey, take aim, drain blood, skin, sever limb from joint, and slice flesh to store for the cold months ahead. Me, I go to the grocery store; my meat has its skin peeled off before I bring it home. Have you sliced the throat of a mammal? Snapped the neck of a fowl? Put a bullet through the soft parts to stop the light in the eyes of a creature who leaps or flies? Do you know what it is to crouch in brush and wait, hoping the wind does not carry your human scent to the nostrils of whatever beast you’re trying to catch? I don’t. But something stirs in the blood this time of year regardless. Maybe you feel it, too. Maybe you’re able to detect things that normally elude our dulled and faulty senses. As if all of a sudden noses become more alert. May and June have their blooms, the dewy grassy floral scent of spring. Late fall smells earthier: mulch, ash, the turpentine tang of decay, worm chew, slowing sap, flinty night. Read More