TheBanyanTree: full moon birthday

[Julie Anna Teague]

The moon was full on my forty-fifth birthday, the near-full weight
of it keeping me awake for days before and days after in the quiet
hours of the night, the hours that are ripe for reflection and
restlessness.  I need darkness to sleep, and have room-darkening
curtains over the windows.  But when the moon is full it seeps around
the cracks at the sides of the curtains and finds me.  With a pillow
over my head, I still feel the moonlight pounding at my lids.  And when
I open the bedroom door and wander through my night house, it is
spilling in at every curtain-less window and every room is heavy with
silver light.

I have never minded the big, round numbers like thirty and forty.
Starting a new decade always seems like a grand adventure that I am
more than ready to begin.  What will life be like in my forties?  Will
it be better than my thirties?  Will I be wiser or stronger or happier?
But the mid-decade birthdays get me down just a bit--the sense
of time running downhill, all my life energy being funneled and
propelled in one direction, half against my will.  The questions take on
a new urgency.  "IS this better yet?", "AM I wiser or stronger or happier
yet?"  If there are things left undone which I wanted to accomplish in this
decade of life, the time is ripe for doing them.  And there are those
undone things.  Unstarted things.  And, I am not quite ready to admit,
possibly no longer doable things.

Forty-five, full moon, I lie awake wondering.  Some of the events that
have happened in the past five years, good and bad, were not even on my
radar at forty.  They have caught me off-guard, left me standing
slack-jawed without an immediately appropriate response.  The crap-load
of sadness surrounding my youngest son was simply not to be predicted.
My partner being diagnosed with cancer--whammy--not foreseeable.  My
niece, born five years ago, was totally unexpected, even by her
parents.  Finding a job that I love, working for people I respect and
enjoy I would not have guessed at five years ago as I struggled,
miserably, through each day at my old job.  My oldest son has been one
of the most predictable things in my life.  He's always been a good,
loving, funny kid who has been a pleasure to travel through life with,
and all those things he remains, as steady and strong as the full moon
light through my windows.

Farmer's almanac says to plant in the full moon.  Of course, they mean
May or June, the planting season.  But I am a child of frost and early
freezes and spent stalks, so I have to make due with what I've got on
my birthday full moon.  I can save these seeds of reflection, plant
them in my heart, feed them on the kind of love and understanding and
patience that I did not own in my thirties.  This, at least, I know--
in as much as things are undone or unresolved, sad or scary or
painful, at forty-five, my heart is big enough for all of it. And also
big enough to contain a lifetime of searing joy, uncontrolled laughter,
huge, happy, thrilling, poignant stuff.

And so the second half of my fortieth decade begins late at night, in
the silvery light of a full moon.

Julie