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Driving to a friend"s house on a recent evening, I was awe-struck by the
sight of the full moon rising just above Manila rooftops, huge and swollen,
yellow through the dust and smoke of the city. I stopped to watch it for a few
moments, reflecting on what a pity it was that most city dwellers ?myself
included ?usually miss sights like this because we spend most of our lives
indoors.
My friend had also seen it. He grew up living in a forest in Europe, and
the moon meant a lot to him then. It had touched many aspects of his life,
including those concerning his ordinary daily life. For example, when he had to
make sure that he had his torch with him when he was outside in the evening, or
when the moon was due to rise late or was at its newest ?a bright, distant
sliver of white like a chink of light below a door in the sky.
I know the feeling. Last December I took my seven-year-old daughter to the
mountainous jungle of northern India with some friends. We stayed in a forest
rest-house with no electricity or running hot water. Our group had campfires
outside every night, and indoors when it was too cold outside. The moon grew to
its fullest during our trip. At Binsar, 7, 500 feet up in the Kumaon hills, I
can remember going out at 10pm and seeing the great Nanda Devil mountain like a
ghost on the horizon, gleaming white in the moonlight and flanked by Trishul,
the mountain considered holy by Hindus. Between me and the high mountains lay
three or four valleys. Not a light shone in them and not a sound could be heard.
It was one of the quietest places I have ever known, a bottomless well of
silence. And above me was the full moon.
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On the same trip, further down by the plains, we stayed in village style
clay huts at the edge of a wheat field, with a cold river tumbling over rocks a
few yards away. Late at night, underneath the full moon, everything seemed
bathed in a quiet supernatural light, and we could see the stones in the river,
and watch the deer and antelope crossing, almost half a kilometre away.
I also remember sitting on the beach at San Antonio in Zambales, one night
in the Philippines about two years ago, watching the South China Sea hiss
against the sand. The full moon rose and hung over the sea like a huge lantern
in the sky. I felt as if I could walk up and touch it.
Last summer, on another trip, I met the caretaker of a rest-house at
Chitkul, 11, 000 feet above the plains at the top end of the Sangla Valley in
the Indian Himalayas, two days?walk from China誷 Tibet. We sat in the sun looking
at the scattering of stone-tiled roofs, and the stony valley climbing away
between the mountains towards China誷 Tibet, leaving behind the small, struggling
vegetable patches planted by the farmers and herders of this, the last village
before the border. We were a thousand feet above the tree-line; every winter the
place is covered with several feet of snow.
The caretaker was a local, an old man with the craggy face and thin beard
typical of the high plateaus. He didn誸 have a watch or calendar 裯obody in that
village of less than 200 people had one. I asked him how he knew which month it
was. He turned and pointed to the row of snow peaks towering above us across the
valley. 襑hen the morning sun falls first on that peak it is January,?he said.
襑hen it falls first on that second peak it is February, and on the third it is
March and so on.?The cycles of the sun and moon are simple but gigantic forces
which have shaped human lives since the beginning. Wise men and women studied
them not as scientists, but as mystics; ancient communities worshipped them.
Today so many of us miss this experience because we are inside cars or houses
all the time. We have lost our sense of wonder at the elements ?our lives are
full of forces that are so new and barely understood that we are confused
shadows of what we should be.
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发表于 2016-7-10 16:31:46