First: a memory.
When I was little, my grandmother and I overnighted in a cabin by the water. She pulled me from the book I was lost in, outside, and pointed a knobbly finger at the moon hanging in state. “There she is. Mother Moon. We’re her children, you and I.”
Part of me wanted to roll my eyes; she was always saying things like that. We were both born in July, under the moon-ruled sign of Cancer, and she found every chance to remind me. But another part of me stirred as we stood there in the mist. The moonlight twisted down from the dark, a filigreed thread beckoning. Suddenly my loyalty seemed decided: I felt a sleepy and deep-rooted kind of wonder, the kind that only seems to exist in childhood and in dreams you can’t remember. (Aren’t they a little bit the same thing?)
Second: a moment.
Mother Moon was full again this past Saturday. As I stood outside with my camera pointed toward the heavens, I heard two of my neighbors approach my building. They paused, and I knew they were trying to work out what I was doing. And then one of them spoke. “Mira la luna,” he said softly, voice suffused with awe. Look at the moon.
They did not speak again for several minutes. In the cold and the dark, the three of us standing there, I felt that same silent wonder bind us together.
Third: a match.
Call it influence or inevitability, but I know more about my astrology these days than my grandmother does. For now, consider these three dualities, three flashes of the mirror:
My sun sign, Cancer, is ruled by the moon.
My moon sign, Leo, is ruled by the sun.
This February full moon was in Leo, sign of the sun.
For so long, I thought I was all Moon-daughter: I have a love for solitude, for other people’s secrets, and the hours after midnight when the city goes quiet. But the older I got, the more loves I accumulated that smacked of Sun: the long light of honey-summer, picking out the perfect birthday card, how alive I feel at the center of a warm-lit room with warm-spirit friends.
These are the light, sweet things. But what seemed to me contradictions began to emerge everywhere, and I fought them a long time. Haven’t you ever? Been told you can only be, have, do one thing? Felt it tug at some seam in you, only to ignore the rippage and file quietly into the line you choose —— because you have been made to choose between?
There is something my therapist calls a double dip: two emotions, seemingly contradictory, felt at the same time. I am learning double dips exist everywhere, not just in my head. I am learning I can be both.
I can harness both the monastic discipline of recording, and the brilliant chaos of the stage. I can create in whatever form I like, under my own name. Wild in joy, knocked windless by pain, in the same body, in the same day. Muted moon. Steady sun.
When I think of it as a fight, I lose automatically. I have always been both —— and by all the stars in the sky, I am the better for it.