We were always with the moon cycle it seemed. When we landed in Germany at the end of July it was a blue moon, when we left Amsterdam by ferry to Newcastle it was full again, and on our last night in Scotland it was the same.

Though it was dark and stormy I went out in it, into the countryside by some trees, the light of the moon milky with the swirling clouds, all of it animated. I stood for a while in the path looking up, trying to look into the eyes of the moon, waiting for something that would feel like a god talking to me, some message or meaning.

In the distance was the light from the windows of our flat the size of thumbnails, soft orange. I pictured my family by the lamp lights reading with their blankets by the fire, but felt I needed to be out in the dark instead, there was something more important for me there.

It was our last night after a month in Scotland and in the morning we were on a ferry to Belfast. There were maps in the flat that showed exactly where we were, the lines of longitude and latitude, the degrees. I thought we might never come back, though Dawn said one day we should, when the kids were older and it’d be just the two of us, we could be creative and take a month just to write. The place seemed charmed.

The moon was back a year later, early morning. Dawn got up in the 4 o’clock hour to get ready for a meeting and I thought about checking email. I was working now too, and there were people scattered across different time zones checking in.

It was the unmistakable light of the moon in the morning in our den, and I lay down with my coffee in the dark to watch the sky change. I walked to the lake and thought about work, the fact I used to feel bad about it, but it’s more important how you feel about your work than the fact you think about it.

I sat on a rock by the lake with some geese and watched the mist, the light reflecting on the lakefront homes, and thought as we get into our middle age, there’s more of the past than our future left to consider — how hard but important it is we observe the present, and maybe that’s why I couldn’t really write about it when we were living there, I was too busy living it, trying to take what I could from the eyes of the moon.

Categories: musings, travel, writing

Tags: creative nonfiction, Memoir, moon poetry, travel, William Pearse writer, work-life balance, writing process