Under the blood moon...

I know there isn’t a God (he’s just an imagined being thought up by men to keep other men in order), but there’s certainly plenty of magic in the universe.

The magic came early last night and was everywhere. It began with one of the biggest, brightest moons I’ve ever seen rising above the houses behind my backyard. A huge sphere of a moon, crossed by contrails and glowing, a supermoon, so close that you could almost touch it. The kind of moon a cow would jump over, a moon worth lassoing, a moon to kiss under, a moon to wish upon if ever you had a dream in your heart.

Later, in the early hours, the magic began again as the moon aligned with the Earth and the sun and passed behind the Earth’s umbra, its shadow, shielding the moon from the sun’s light. There in their own silent spaces those three sat with the Earth sandwiched between the others as the moon turned a deep burnt red and became an autumn apple in the sky. It looked so red that I wanted to reach up and pick it from the air to see if it tasted of Edam cheese.

 

For a while the moon looked angry, a blood moon looking down on our world with scorn. Then, as the hours passed, it began to change once more, slowly shifting shape to crescent and back to full again as the sun and Earth moved on, each in their own pre-ordained, enigmatically, celestial way.

I wondered as I watched and drank my apple brandy what the hunters of the forest must have thought of a lunar eclipse all those tens of thousands of years ago. Did they tremble and wait for the world to end? Did they dance strange animal dances adorned with wolf pelts and howl in the moonlight? Did they fall to their knees and worship the moon? Maybe they did all three.

No, there’s no room in my world for an imagined God. But there’s enough real magic in the universe to more than make up for that.