Another Moon

Not last night's moon but a full moon I will never forget.
Setting over Molokai's west side as the sun rose in the east.
One of the most beautiful sights I've ever seen.

There are so many things that I could be writing about right now, but for the life of me, no matter how many hours I sit at this computer, not one of them has come to fruition.

I wanted to write that I got a completely unexpected phone call last week about an upcoming 50th high school reunion. That it was really wonderful to talk to the woman on the other end of the phone that I had been friends with in elementary school but whose friendship hadn't followed us to middle school and high school. And that when she wondered aloud why that might have been, the curtains were suddenly pulled back on my life back then; things I've never seen about the disconnect between my home life and my school life; the secret shame and isolation standing there naked in the light.

I wanted to write that a week ago yesterday I spent at least five or six hours happy for no reason. And how it was so patently obvious in its unusual-ness that it astonished me. It was like I was standing outside myself marveling at this oh so rare happening, mouth agape, as though watching a once a century total eclipse. That it didn't even dawn on me until days later that this may have something to do with being in the process of focusing on my heart's desire, which is, as I wrote a couple of posts ago, to wake up each morning with purpose, eager and excited to get up and see what wants to be created that day.

But then by the next day, the confusion settled like thick fog back in around me. And with it the constant loop of hope and hopelessness that springs from the multiple facets that make us who we are: both form and not form, pure light and also physical bodies. From the light springs this heart's desire; the profound yearning to live with excitement and creativity; in essence, to live fully. Then there is this body, my body, that lives so much of the time with pain and exhaustion and limitation. And my brain, with pathways worn in deeply challenging ways by life and experience and trauma, in a tizzy trying to figure out how this all might even be possible; how these twain shall meet; as if it were up to it in the first place.

Then last night's full moon. Big and bold, making me think about the time that I fell in love under another moon. Gigantic and swollen and bright yellow, it was just revealing itself over the hills when I picked a new friend up from the BART station the day after Thanksgiving. It lit the way as we wound through the canyon, parked, and walked onto the property where Amma, India's hugging saint's ashram is. Later, it was high overhead as we sat side by side, shoulders and thighs touching, heady music and chanting and incense wafting out from the temple into the night air as he told me his remarkable, heart wrenching story. But even before that, before that night, before he told me about being gay and HIV positive and isolated and terrified as a young man twenty-some years before that, being told he would be dead within six months, watching friend after friend die, telling no one, not even his mother, in the end not developing AIDS; even before that, from the first time he walked into a class I was taking, bringing with him a cloud of fresh early summer air, and sat down opposite me in the circle, I was a goner. That night, that moon, that story; those shoulders and thighs and startling blue eyes, just cemented it.

A year and two months later~ten years ago this year~I left my marriage. Not for him, obviously, but for me. Because in my marriage I felt as though I was suffocating and all I wanted, even if I couldn't have Matthew, was to breathe again; though mostly, profoundly, what I longed for was to feel fully alive again, to have the dying embers of my heart stirred and burst wildly back into flame~which I then knew, after so many arid years, was possible.

And here we are again.

Except that last week~mysteriously~ I was happy for no reason.