Moon Cradle

[pegkerr]

Tonight at quarter to nine I stepped out the back door on my way to go clean the dojo. I glanced up at the sky--and stopped dead in my tracks. Immediately, I went back inside the house and called the girls downstairs. "Come outside, girls. You have to see this."

Puzzled but dutiful, they trooped downstairs and then looked up as I pointed. "Ohhhhh," Fiona breathed.

The sky was perfectly clear. A lovely crescent moon hung over the house in the twilit sky, the dark part of it visible as a faint glimmer of silver against the purer blue-black. Venus dazzled just to one side, bright and clear. "Oh, how beautiful!" Delia exclaimed in a hushed voice.

"Yes," I said in quiet satisfaction. "I wanted to share it with you."

Fiona gave me a look that told me she understood. "Take a picture of that with your heart, and keep it to remember," I told her. I looked back up at the sky and took my own picture with my own heart. Something to remember when the world seems frightening and dangerous and cursed and teeming with mad hates.

There is surpassing beauty here, too, which can be found by simply looking up into the sky.

"Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach."

The Return of the King

The moon-cradle's rocking and rocking,
Where a cloud and a cloud go by,
Silent rocking and rocking
The moon-cradle out in the sky.

Comments

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

So it is Venus? A friend of mine and I have been running and I'm constantly distracted by the big shiny planet. Last night, big shiny planet with bonus earthshiny moon, we got into a semi-argument over which planet it was. Venus seemed logical, but Venus is not one of my planets.
Of course, we turned away from the pretty halfway through the run, so I was whining and cursing my legs and not able to see it. Poor planning on my part.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

The link to Minnesota Starwatch which I provided above noted that Venus is visible for two hours after sunset this month. Saturn is visible, too, as bright as the brightest star, "but not even close to the brightness of Venus." So I think it was Venus.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I'm used to looking up as I walk across campus at night and seeing Jupiter or Saturn-- sophomore year, Mars, but mostly the big ones. Once I had a fix on them, I could find them just about all winter. Venus was always hidden down by the horizon, if she was up at all. Being in grad school and not having to walk all over the place, I've missed my stargazing.