Of Course It’s Cloudy!
It’s so frustrating how often it seems to be cloudy outside when a full moon, an eclipse, a meteor shower, or any other such celestial event is taking place.
Mind you, I’ve witnessed some very cool atmospheric and ‘cosmic’ events. So many, I suppose, that I really have no standing to complain. But hey – it’s Friday the 13thand the last time a full moon will take place on this date until I am 90 damn years old.
I would like to have seen it, documented it in my journal, perhaps even made an, albeit woefully inadequate, attempt to snap a shot of it for posterity. But no.
Now I have to do my best to cling to this mortal coil for another 30 years, just so I can point to this cranky-ass blog post and say, “See? I was aware of the last one, and I hung in there another thirty years just to finally SEE this one!”
Another Score for Journaling
One interesting little vignette, though: I checked and found that I did, in fact, make an entry in my journal back on Friday, October 13, 2000. And the very first sentence I wrote was: “FULL MOON (in Aries, no less).” (The ‘no less’ comment was because my sun sign is Aries. Therefore I obviously felt that full moon might be tweaking me a bit more powerfully.)
I didn’t make any reference to the fact that the full moon was also falling on a Friday the 13th. This was early internet days, definitely pre-Google and pre-FB, so the heightened awareness of occurrences like these (and perhaps even more relevantly, their relative either commonplace nature or rarity) were much less well known. I probably didn’t bat an eye at the confluence of these two events. Indeed, had I known that it would not occur again until this day, one month shy of 19 years later, I would have mentioned it in my journal – and pondered what my life might be like all those years in the future.
Twenty Years Ago
I was entering the final stages of publication of Owl Medicine. Good grief, that’s depressing. To think – I published my book that long ago and still haven’t followed up with the sequel(s).
In that entry, I also discuss creating my website, which I initially set up under www.sagebearpress.com. (If you click on that link, you’ll see I’ve kept that name and simply reroute visitors to my Owl Medicine site, which, back then, I was only toying with setting up as a website.
My Reward for the Day: A Reminder
As I’ve found happens more often than I can say, once I went back and started reading my entry for October 13, 2000, I was drawn into indulging my curiosity over what else was going on in our lives and occupying my mind at that time.
And that’s when I discovered quite a surprise.
A week after that Friday the 13th full moon co-incidence, I’d apparently found a bit more time to write in my journal and therefore covered a lot more ground in my entry of October 20th than I had on the 13th.
As background, a year or so earlier, I had scaled down my law practice to a substantial degree in order to focus upon the final stages of writing, editing, and publishing Owl Medicine. Given that OM was nearly ready to ‘hatch,’ I was contemplating my full-bore return to the workforce, and I was weighing whether I wanted to reinvigorate my private law practice or branch into some other (as yet unknown) area.
Without going into the somewhat maudlin self-assessment I was engaged in that day, I have to admit I was astonished to read that I considered “…the stuff I (…) do ‘best’ is listening.”
Of course, I lamented at that time that I probably could never get paid enough to contribute meaningfully to our family’s well-being by just ‘listening.’
Listening – It’s Been the Theme of My Life
What I guess I’m surprised by is how listening has been such a persistent and critically important aspect of my life for so many years. Actually, it’s the underlying theme of my life. And yet – I’m always surprised by how important it’s always been to me.
I wonder why I’m surprised?
All I know is that on this full moon, on this Friday the 13th, I’m deciding to take my love for and commitment to listening to the next level.
(T-805)