Selene said to say "g'day"

You shoulda seen her tonight. Just waning off the full, she rose up first behind a low-on-the-horizon bank of rumpled clouds. One of them was sort of bulbous, so for a minute or two there were two moons, one on top of the other. Then just her, big and brazen, luscious and lascivious on a bed of shining vapour.

I was thinking about that old Disney tele-flick, The Mooncussers ... the smugglers who cuss the moon. I had nothing to cuss, though. Even most of the Milky Way is still spread deep across the night, and here and there a shooting star. Later, no chance for that, the night goddess will be whitening the whole ceiling. The Milky Way has to fade sometimes or it would burn up the universe.

Up she came, Selene. Big and orange, like the blazing, sparking bonfire someone was having up the north end. Good luck to 'em. It's 25 degrees, the sky is clear as a bell and here comes the goddess up from the wild side of the planet.

This is a great way to look at her, staring you down right in the face and shooting a beam of orange laser across the Big Pond. I also like her on the other side of the night, when she's heading for bed in the west and lights up the breakers hitting the shore. That's when things really get the smuggler look, like when I was a kid playing in the bush at night, in my sheet, scaring the pants off my friends and even some ladies. I like the ghost look that comes around each month, the headless horseman riding the beach look.

You have to wake up early for that setting moon vibe. Or better still, stay up real late. Like my folklore campadre in the US, Anneli Rufus, says,

"For in a hard-working society, it is rare and even subversive to celebrate too much, to revel and keep on reveling: to stop whatever you're doing and rave, pray, throw things, go into trances, jump over bonfires, drape yourself in flowers, stay up all night, and scoop the froth from the sea."

If ever there was a time I was certain that for people to have a soul, or at least, for them to really know they do, they have to scarpa from the city ASAP, it's on moonlit nights.

I was sitting there on the sand thinking, if some researchers got together, say, ten million words of collected poems, lyrics and prayers from the English language, all written before, say, 1950 when most people in the Western world could still breathe, and compared ten million words from poems, songs and prayers written post-2000, what would be the difference in rate of usage of words like "moon", "stars", "Milky Way", "flowers", "butterflies", "stillness"? Someone should do that sometime. You can see those words dying in front of us. That's you and me on the floor.

Selene coming up over a country horizon is probably the best way to dissolve a head full of bills, TV show crap, noise, cars, other people's bullshit, your own bullshit, my bullshit, and probably even anxiety and depression. They should write it out like a prescription. But that will never happen until they can sell us moonlight, like we'll never get solar energy until they can sell us sunshine.

People have to write their own prescriptions, and do their own staying up late, jumping over bonfires and scooping froth from the sea, at peril of their lives. It's a self-help thing, like cleaning your teeth. The dentist'll tell you you should do it, but you've got to put the brush in and boogie.