Harvest Moon

It's the beginning of the end of September, and summer and autumn are lying together in their egalitarian embrace, tongue-kissing.  Autumn breathes her misty chill into the final nights of summer, but the first weekend of the new season promises to be as hot as anything we've had all year, temperatures rising into the nineties.

I have been walking at night again, enjoying the coolness, the exhilaration of mist caressing my face, the edges of the world muted and softened and brought a little closer.  My soul rises up in me at how beautiful things are, while remaining so ordinary.  The trees and the houses and the drab sidewalk neither brown nor gray seem to possess a rare inner radiance; surely it's just the glow of the streetlight reflecting off the moisture in the air, but it transforms everything like new love.

It's been too long since I have felt so keenly the magic lonely loveliness of night, the stillness and solitude that ache with a plaintive yearning more sweet than any fulfillment I can even imagine, and I don't know whether to laugh or cry, or simply fall to my knees.  Breathing in brisk swaths of mist, I feel myself restored to my native state, my natural condition, small and dark and vulnerable yet vast enough inside my skin to contain a universe of joy and awe.

The evening of the equinox, the sky is clear and cold, and the moon is full, shining pure and bright atop the black dome of night.  This is one of only two days on the calendar in which day and night are of equal length all over the globe, the other being of course the first day of spring.  North of the Arctic Circle the sun set today for the first time since March, and the scientists and penguins in Antarctica were treated to the only sunrise they'll see this year.  Here in southern California, the difference isn't so pronounced; the only thing you might notice if you happened to be paying attention was that the days have been getting shorter and shorter awfully fast lately.  The change in the length of the daylight hours relative to the hours of darkness isn't consistent throughout the year; for a month on either side of the solstices, in June and December, you can hardly see a difference at all from one day to the next, but immediately before and after the equinoxes, the darkness is pushing back the daylight hours (or vice versa) so fast you can't help but feel a little dizzy.  It's something to do with geometry, with the properties of a circle, but poetically I like to imagine it as an eternal power struggle, the victor already predetermined, slithering up suddenly from the dull lull of a prior defeat and quickly beating the enemy into a hasty and indisputable retreat before settling down to rest on its laurels awhile.

Today, the night got the upper hand.  The night, my time.  I know it's foolish, but I can't help enjoying a slight vicarious thrill that I've been rooting for the winning team.  The night is mine, and the autumn - the season of my birth, the season of moist overripeness and the air scented with the glory of demise.  This is the season of the flourishing of everything I stand for and believe in, the season of my flourishing at last.