Cycles of Change, Glimmers of Hope in the Darkness

We've been here before, we'll be here again. This too, will pass, and pass again.

Happy full moon and happy new year! And happy Monday, I suppose?

This month, perhaps because folks may have New Year’s Resolutions on the mind, or because we are going through some massive changes as parents (Jonah is crawling! and we are teaching him to sleep in his crib! and I’m going to be commuting back to school again!), I was thinking about the moon as a symbol of a cycle of change. Also, the moon can be a glimmer of hope (the good of humanity, friends/family, people or things or art that helps us transcend the drudgery of reality) in the darkness (LA wildfires, political insanity, global instability).

But really, large sweeping metaphors about society aside, I’m thinking of this board book that we’ve been reading to my son Jonah since he was about 2 months old called The House in the Night, in which the moon features the moon. And it’s fun to think about how we introduce things like “The Moon” to babies and kids.

David and I have discussed the symbolism of the book a lot — somewhere perhaps on the verge of getting bored reading it again and again — but unlike some other less profound or artistically apt books, this one gets deeper as you analyze it further.

So without further ado, here are some of my favorite moments from this sweet sweet children’s book:

There’s very little text, and it’s quite poetic, like a poem in verses spread out throughout gorgeous illustrated pages. It introduces a house in the night, a girl with a book on a bed (getting ready to go to sleep), and in the book, she flies on the bird to the moon, sees the sun, and is transported through the dark night safely back to her room, which is lit both by the light of the moon and the light of her parents’ love.

There’s a sense of safety, of mysticism, of hope in the darkness, and of the wonder in the everyday. How does the moon glow? Magic! When do we see the moon? Literally every night when it’s not cloudy except on a complete new moon when it is regenerating itself. There are a lot of profound meanings even in these simple words.

Beautiful, isn’t it?

And when Jonah reads this book, his face lights up — especially on the moon and sun pages. Perhaps it’s because they are so beautiful, but I think he senses something very cool at work, something bigger than just the usual bullshit.

That’s my projection of his inner baby monologue, anyway. (This book is better than just the usual bullshit, mom!)

There’s another kid’s book that I remember reading as a child called something like The Moon Followed Me Home. The premise was that a girl looks out the window of her family car on the way home from a trip, and is happily pleased that the moon seems to be following her, since she can see it in the sky continuously — it never disappears. I tried to find the book recently, but a quick google search of kids’ books with titles of that nature returned a TON of hits. Apparently, the idea of the moon following us wherever we go is a popular one.

Anyway, I was thinking of this book and the moon following me home when Jonah and I were traveling back from Boston this fall. It’s a 4.5 hour drive without traffic, so I had timed the drive for Jonah’s bedtime, to try to maximize his uninterrupted sleep time (and just generally praying that he wouldn’t have a several hour car meltdown) and left our dear friend’s house around 7:30, feeding Jonah in the backseat so I could plunk him into his car seat hopefully right on the verge of drowsing off into dreamland. I sang him his bedtime song about 4 times as he protested from the backseat and I drove north from Brookline up through Allston, passed BU, and got on the Mass Pike heading west. By the time we hit full speed on the highway, he was asleep.

However, despite my best laid plans, my phone battery was at 20%, and I had forgotten my car charger at my friend’s house. Whoops.

I know the route home generally: go west and south until Connecticut becomes New York, and follow signs to the George Washington Bridge. But in this age of perpetual GPS on our phones for everything, I don’t have a paper map in my car…. or anywhere, for that matter.

So I decided that I would map the route, and then turn off my phone until a transition point (and then turn it on, get on the next highway, look for the next exit #, and turn it off again). In this case, my first leg of the trip was to take the Mass Pike until we hit the exit to go south towards Hartford. So I turned off my phone while Jonah slept, and without music nor GPS to occupy my attention, turned my eyes to the road… and the moon.

It was a clear night, with a quarter full crescent moon rising in the east. I thought about how the moon would be my companion, much as it was for the girl in the book I had read so long ago, and how the moon would follow me home.

I also thought about my dad, who taught me to drive, and who had been a great lover of long, solo drives. He drove across the country a few times as a young person, and he used to drive me back and forth between his apartment in Brooklyn and my mom’s house on Long Island for years. He drove like a machine, in a good way — calm, dispassionate, fast, steady. Consistent.

Nothing makes you drive faster than try to race your infant’s sleep cycle home, and trying to get to the GW Bridge before your phone battery dies. I drove like the wind, with the moon on my left, keeping me company, as Jonah slept.

It was peaceful. It was a car full of light.

Hope that your dark is full of hope, and that you roll with the changes in your life with the calm of knowing that this cycle, too, will pass.

Here it is, Your Moment of Zen: