How many of you got to see it last night? Strangely, my dog woke me up about 1:40 this morning which rarely happens. I went outside and saw the eclipse already well under way.



I didn't see the redness until it was just about fully eclipsed and then I definitely saw it.



Watching the eclipse last night I realized I was not only witnessing the beautiful blood moon emerging but as the eclipse progressed I was able to watch more and more stars appear. The night was so clear and the eclipse and star show was absolutely magical! What a wonderful unexpected gift of beauty.

Rebecca, Wonderful...Exclamation Point. The miracle of our sensitive companion animals, achingly alert to sounds, visions and vibrations which have unfathomable meanings for our unions. As hounds for visual pleasure, were both you and your canine friend baying at the moon?***

Isn't it a wonder to reflect that the marbling colours of the red moon, at the time of eclipse, are a cast painting of all the shifts of sunrises & sunsets, occurring, at different times & places around our precious globe?


Words

The world does not need words. It articulates itself
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other—
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper—
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always—
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

"Words" by Dana Gioia from Interrogations at Noon. © Graywolf Press, 2001.


***"I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon" (Shakespeare).