A-Z Blog Challenge M: Moon as Metaphor, Metamorphoses for Change
“It has been said that the myth is a public dream, dreams are private myths. Unfortunately we give our mythic side scant attention these days. As a result, a great deal escapes us and we no longer understand our own actions. So it remains important and salutary to speak not only of the rational and easily understood, but also of enigmatic things: the irrational and the ambiguous. To speak both privately and publicly.”
from: Mary Zimmermann, ‘Metamorphoses’, American playwright and director adapted from the classic Ovid poem ‘Metamorphoses’ with thanks to Merril Smith who posted this quote on her Monday Morning Muses earlier this month.
We were in Plettenberg Bay last month for our son’s wedding to his beautiful bride. A few nights later it was full moon (23rd March) and I took this photo from our balcony. I felt full too, on many levels, fit to burst.
Already when we returned home the moon was on the wane and no longer visible in the night sky. I see it in the day, white, high or a little bit lower in the sky depending on the time of day I look up. The stars are brighter these nights. Last night she seemed to have passed the half-way mark and was bright.
We are like to the moon in our meanderings, sometimes visible sometimes not. We also wax and wane in the process of change. Sometimes we shine bright, sometimes we’re in shadow.
What is more powerful than the moon who causes tides to change from shore to shore –
Oscar Wilde in his ‘De Profundis’ (one of the most depthful, profound and beautiful writings ever, for me), writes:
‘He is in sympathy with the artist who knows that the poet must sing and the sculptor who thinks in bronze and the painter who makes the world a mirror for his moods…’ and that this imperative ‘… is as sure of that of the hawthorn in spring and of the corn that will turn to gold at harvest time and the moon in her wanderings will change from shield to sickle and sickle to shield’.
I came across this from brainpickings.org:
Henry Miller:
‘Art is as deep and high and wide as the universe. There is nothing but art, if you look at it properly. It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis’.
From full to empty to full again – always returning – always in change. And sometimes at night when looking up I wonder about the myth of the moon, and what is my myth? Am I working on it to give it space to unfold?