come a full moon night

I used to like standing in our front yard when the nights were dark and the only light was from the windows of the house. Mom would open the kitchen door and call my name and I'd answer and she'd go back inside, but leave the door open, light spilling out onto the hard-packed dirt yard like a solid block of sunshine.

With the lights of the house to my back and my eyes to the sky, I'd listen to the wind up high in the trees, sounding like horses going by, or like a river. I was just shy of being old enough for school. Nowdays, a kid that age is already in the system, but back then, we had time.

Days had weight to them. They had heft, just like all the products of those years. Nothing had thinned down.

I'd watch the moon through its moods. accepting the too-bright full moon a little nervously, like the wild things that hid from predators, seeking the sliver-moon as best for venturing.

But I loved them all, a sliver in the starry sky, all the way up to when the moon's light put the stars to shyness. The moon, those nights, would look like a sunny hillside. I could imagine being out on some high mountain where the sun still shone, long after night claimed the valleys and the mountaintops here on earth.

That, right there, is religion.

I was a little girl of the hills, youngest daughter of a gentle family, with about as much chance of getting my own way in this world as a seed has of deciding what it'll grow into. But I was bigger than that when the moon came full and the wind was high and the night painted the woods into some wild and old mystery.

My little granddaughter goes out at night and looks at the stars. She's done this since she was an infant in arms, leaning toward the door, just before we put her down to sleep. Leaning toward the door and saying, 'moon, g'night moon'. My own mother did the same when she was small. That's how she knew not to bother me, to open the door and then go back inside,leaving a homelight like a thread to tether me to the place and time, when I decided to turn back to it. And her Mom, and hers and hers and hers, I have no doubt, all back through time.

Some say we're born into each life within the groupsoul we knew in all the lives past. That families come again, knowing each other, finding each other. It's the mythwork of soul-mates and a tricky business outside of blood kin. Others say we're born into the line of blood-relatedness. That we are our ancestors, come back again, knowing in those hours when we are too young to give the secrets out. Then forgetting as we grow older. "And down they forgot as up they grew..."

The groupsoul that is us loves mist and rain and days that are lovely grey. We love the dark shadows when the trees are in night or November. And we love the moon in all phases, though possibly best as crescent, kissing the night before following her path behind the mountain which is always in our most loved landscape.

It came to me at last, through my searching for religion that suited, that it was possible to honor the moon and in so doing, become that one again who honored the night and the spirit of the wild.

Now, these full moon nights, I light a candle, something to tether me to time and place on my return. Then I pick up my spirit drum and find the song. The song tells me the story of the night and the time and the Tribe and in which ways I need to craft the energy given, in what way I need to kindle the fire required of a hearthkeeper.