What does the lunar eclipse do for us? It unites us -- that's what! It reminds us that we are all under the same beautiful full moon, shining brightly one minute, eclipsed the next -- a lot like life. I was fortunate enough to watch the eclipse in Hawaii and watched in awe and amazement.
The blood orange is like the blood that man spills in battle with one another time and again in senseless indifference when it is brother against brother maiming and killing yet it keeps happening over and over with no end in sight. There are so many wars going on in the world and our own country seems to take great joy in jumping into them at the drop of a hat if it means a drop of oil or a bag of Euros might be at stake. And sometimes we jump in even when they are not. According to ABC News, we just spent three million dollars a pop on our spiffy new naval destroyers. Yet there are still homeless people sleeping in the park.
When the moon turned blood red, I wondered how many lives we need to sacrifice, how many limbs we needed to lose, how many brains we needed to damage. I grew up with a father with a serious WWII injury who was very anti-war and he beseeched me to try to stop war. To that end, I wrote a book called My Dangerous Secret, which won't be out until 2016, which tells the story of a teenager in the midst of WWII amidst the Nazis and the Allied Forces and his confusion over a madmen who is spreading hate and war in equal doses while our teen tries to become a man.
The blood red moon is not forever and when the moon gets covered in black, it's almost like the mourning after a war when we mourn the losses and need to regroup and get back up and running. It is a failure for us all, even if we have won the war. But in failure, there is strength, like the Hemingway quote about a bone healing stronger than it was before it was hurt. Maybe.
In darkness, we drown. Where is our moon? Suddenly, we are floundering! We need our moon to grab a hold of in to keep afloat! She is part of who we are and we cannot lose her! After some time in the darkness, a familiar moon emerges, just a tiny squeak of the moon, but there she is in all her glory -- wise, mystical, watery, grounding us in a way that we need even if we don't quite understand why. Maybe that's why we needed to go to the moon!
Our moon for the world. We are all under it. So, let's stop dividing ourselves up into countries, races, neighborhoods, and cliques. We are all one family under one moon and if it takes a lunar eclipse to remind us of this, then bring on some more! The next one is October 7. Don't miss it!