singing songlines to the moon

on tiny joys, illuminated

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“The Argentinian’s are so in love with the moon,” my friend says, speaking to us of her most recent travels. “They made me notice and fall back in love with her too. As soon as she comes out, they all run to see. ‘Oh, La Luna, you are so beautiful. La Luna, we love you.’”

She starts to sing:

Oh, La Luna, La La La luna

Her words circle us, our voices join in too; me, my friend, Joell, my two boys,

Oh, La Luna, la la la luna

as though singing to the moon was the best and right thing to do.

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Preparations for the impromptu base camp had begun. Green fold up chairs dragged across the pine slat wooden deck, the small hands clasping them shrieking as grey metal frames snap at their toes, a cacophony of shrill voices and the drag of reluctant rubber. Once positioned in a place that satisfied the somewhat bossy and authoritative camp committee, aged 9 and 13- ‘not there, here! That’s too close! Move it over a bit!’- my youngest, Tommy, skips off to his bedroom. He returns moments later, twirling and stumbling, the bottom edge of the blankets licking under his feet in soft, faltering waves- child of the bouncing hair, child of the legs that always run and never walk- arms filled with the blush blue, dog-pattern blankets off his now-stripped bed, along with everything else that felt grabbable, urgent and possible. A wake of stuffed toys and Lego pieces form currents falling like candy floss and cherry seeds in his overflow.

Not to be left behind, my eldest son determinedly follows suit, a naked, shivering mattress and a random, lonely pillow the only evidence of small people occupation left behind. He emerges, triumphant, puffy blanket bejewelled, covering the ground to the chairs outside with thumping steps that could be attributed to a man four times his age and the same times over in height.

“Come ON mum,” they both implore, “Joell is already out here!” They gesture wildly to my friend. Two seats await for four bodies to take up residence, an amphitheater of stars and the ultimate show of a blush blood moon bathed in earthlight.

Oh La Luna, la la la luna.

For a few moments, I fuss around in the kitchen, making a drink, letting the activities of the day slide off my body, listening to the hum of voices excitedly whirring outside. Tommy would speak, or perhaps Flynn, and then Joell, followed, inevitably, by an explosion of giggles. My belly swirls with a warmness; the peripheral lip of outside joy catches me, and I find myself feeling a strange mix of gratitude and relief, love and the potential future loss that comes with catching yourself in a moment of happiness, both experienced and witnessed in real time.

Whatever this is, this specific name not known to me when good friends love on your children and your heart feels unbearably glad, when the world you rest in for just this moment is peaceful, when you recognize yourself, slung in this universal hammock, in this body, loving on the moon. Oh la Luna, I want to rest with you forever.

I slip into the chair next to Tommy, who whirs his legs like a stranded insect, kicking up the covers to make space. We poke at the black plastic nobs positioned either side as though activating the mission control panel. 3, 2, 1, liftoff. The seat dutifully reclines, shooting backwards at a velocity that causes our bodies to reflexively flail and grapple, reaching for the edges of the chair as though a life raft. We both let out yet shriek, a snort of laughter accompanying the expectation that we’re absolutely, most certainly, very shortly going to hit the ground, only to find that we have stopped. We have pierced the atmosphere, the rockets have stabilised, the spaceship has reached her cruising altitude. We are here, in our blanketed cocoon, watching the planetary mycorrhizal network, the universal, original, incorruptible star-spangled banner, bodies flat, eyes moon-ward, minds spilling into an inky, moon tinged night.

Tommy announces loudly, “Welcome to Tommy’s Hotel!” in a tone that suggests he’s never been quite so delighted.

I thank him for his generosity in hiring me a room, and for a few brief seconds he curls around me like a baby fox, his slight framed, blonde curled topped body consumable, dissolvable, delectable. He grips me like a limpet. I kiss his head and inhale, but the moment of stillness is gone, and moments later, I find myself sharing a seat with a stranded preying mantis, all legs and arms and hard edges, deftly finding the spaces between ribs, the soft flesh just above my hip bone.

“Mother of god,” I say to him amid another prod induced exhale, pushed to the outer confines of the chair “do you ever sit still?”

He snorts and shoots back a reply.

“I’m just not used to it,” he says, completing another round of aeronautics in the Sitting Still Olympics, adding with a giggle, “You’re my first guest.”

By this stage, the moon is one part lemon citrus slither and seven parts blood orange. We expect that soon she will be a full rose-red, blushing ball before we notice that she’s moving in the opposite direction; that in fact, in all our joviality and distraction, we have missed the very beginning. The dance has already begun, the earth’s flamenco shadow is now sliding off her side, magicked away by the hands she first appeared from.

I consider my expectation of what sharing moments like these would be with my two boys compared to the reality and smile. The boys swing between shrieks and fart jokes and moments of deep thought.

Tommy looks directly up.

“Is it true that space is internal?” he asks me, “that it just goes on forever?”

“Eternal,” I say, smiling to myself “and yes, they say that space is infinite”. My voice trails off.

“That’s a lot to get your head around”.

I nod silently.

“I agree.”

He pauses, pensive for a while, before as a collective, we turn to spotting satellites and the space station.

We start by counting them at first but soon surrender; there are so many, zipping round like white, focused fireflies it becomes less novelty, more the norm. The one we were definitely sure was the space station is now replaced by the one we are more definitely sure about. It’s faster, brighter, bigger somehow. That one is much more definitely space station than before.

“There are real people up there,” Flynn says incredulously, and we are reverent for another moment, imagining what it must be like to be them, who they are, and what they’re doing, what it feels like to look down. “They circle the earth every 90 minutes,” he continues

We wave and fancy that they see us.

Caught in the majesty of the moment, Joell thinks she can hear something, maybe a bird or an animal. We all do our best to be completely silent, cocking our heads in various directions, listening into the distance with alternative ears. We hypothesise on the potentials, feathered, furred, even finned, at the base of the shadowed outlined mountains, on these golden plains.

After a few seconds, we realize it’s the whirring of the water pump in the shed close by, and our earnestness is sliced in half with giggles.

Pulling our focus from the moon and star scape, we notice the presence of lenticular clouds, a rare cloud form so common to see in this area of Otago that we hand them out like free chocolates.

The cloud above us has settled, like a hovering UFO, and soon shape-shifts to take the outline of a large mouse or rat. Flynn points out through broken, cackling words that we’re positioned right at the point where the body meets the tail.

“If you feel something land on you, I’d be careful” Flynn hoots aloud, his laughter a contagion.

“Gross!” Tommy yells and disappears under our blanket.

Soon, the cloud begins to morph.

“I think it’s turned into a butterfly,” I say, attempting to turn the conversation in a more hopeful direction, and Flynn counters: “With that shape, it’s more a drone.”

“A drone is much more manly mum,” he says, teasing me, his voice pointed and official. He begins an argument with Tommy about the attributes of their new-found manly cloud when Joell and I are both snagged by a flash.

“Shooting star”, we shout at the same time, pointing over to the right

“Oooh,” Tommy complains, “I want to see the shooting star.”

We snicker how a conversation on manliness caused them to miss a shooting star.

“Seems like an apt metaphor,” we say together, and snigger a bit more.

“Can I tell you a story?” Tommy says and begins before hearing a reply.

“You know Christians,” he says, and I say ‘yes’, amused and wondering where exactly this is heading. Flynn begins to talk, catches Tommy’s word mash then stops; all ears turn to Tommy.

“Well, there are all different types of Christians, right?”, he continues, warming up and pleased to have a crowd, “and some of them worship the moon. They say that on the night of the Calypse, that if you sing to the moon, you can bring a dead relative back to life, whichever one you choose.”

Nobly, we’ve all stayed silent to this point, but as Tommy starts to sing “Kum-Bye-Yah-Calypse” no doubt motivated by our earlier moon singing, it’s too much for anyone to handle and for the umpteenth time we all explode into laughter.

“Oh look, Uncle Frank is coming up over the hill,” Flynn says, waving frantically, and I snort into the air, secretly hoping we’ve neither conjured an Uncle Frank nor that he is making his way over the hill, despite the fact he never has existed.

“Calypse might be my new favourite word,” I say. “We should do this every Moon Calypse”

Oh La luna, I say opening my arms towards the sky, la luna, la la la luna.

Calypses dedicated to (re)loving the moon, and (re)loving the world she shines on, still.

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