A Moon Perspective

This post is contributed by Barnaby Porter from his archives. Read the previous post here.
About the full of the Moon, it is reported more babies are born than during the rest of the month. Dogs and werewolves have a glint in their eye and howl a lot. The tides swell to their maximum. Storms blow harder than ever, and cold weather streams down upon us with a vengeance. The full of the Moon is the time for extremes. At least on average that is what the records show. I have to agree it certainly seems so to me.
But one can wonder if what we interpret as extremes of weather and strange events are really that. Ringed as we are by “artificial” horizons, the trees and the hills and built-up skylines, I believe our perspective is foreshortened somewhat. Our lives are governed in large by our local circumstances – that old “can’t see the forest for the trees” effect.
Only when we are visited by the dramatic event at home do we notice how loudly the winds can wail. Only when the tide surges over its habitual bounds do we raise our brows in alarm. The drought, the untimely frost, the casting of a celestial shadow across the well-trodden face of our Earth – these things cause us to pause. They are events to mark down on the calendar. But what if we were to take another look, to assume a new perspective?
What if we were to go to the Moon? From that place, we would see our home against the backdrop of what astronauts have described as the startling, bright blackness of space, clearer than crystal and so black and complete in its infinite depths as to defy all attempts to describe it in sufficiently superlative terms.
Immediately, the sight of Earth, small, blue and alone, would strike us; “So that is how it is,” one would say. The physicist would comment on the little planet’s energy budget and his laws of conservation of energy and of matter. The botanist and the zoologist would contemplate its life-forms and argue the entirely reasonable expectation of a process of evolution in that swirling brew of liquids and gases and its underlying rich compost of fertile substances. The musician would speak eloquently of the symphonic tropical jungle with the percussion of an afternoon thunderstorm, the squealing of pigs, the drowning static of waves on the sand. And the philosopher and mathematician? They, too, would have something to say… of the absolute sense it all makes, of truth, of constancy, of the predictability of little Earth’s sum total of events at any one moment and through time.
How insignificant would seem those dramatic events we experience, seen only as subtle fluctuations when observed from the Moon. The Earth’s pulse would appear feeble against the immense blackness. Winter and summer would show at once, a constant condition, merely switching between hemispheres like a traffic light, their heat budgets maintaining a steady global average. So distant from the clamor of excitable humans, record-breaking local conditions would shrink to within the range of apparent normalcy.
Earth’s measurements taken and plotted on graphs would begin to repeat themselves every 700 hours or so, the time it took the observers on the Moon to circle their home planet. The brightness of reflected Moonlight on its dark side, the tidal bulging of its oceans, the biologically driven color changes, the swirling clouds – all these would reveal a “monthly” period of 29 1/2 “days.” And they would notice, too, changes in the planet’s degrees of tilt. Compared against the tidbits of information jotted down, the mathematician would happily note the extremes of tilt, away from and toward the Sun, almost perfectly coincide with twelve of these monthly periods. How very convenient; 8500 hours – call them a ”year.”
The musician would point out similarities to his sheet music, how the little jots on the graph, with their monthly variations, work themselves into greater and lesser waves to play a harmonious year. His recollection of the Solstice Concert would dwindle to no more than a dot of ink. The botanist would remember his grandfather who was a farmer, shaking his fist at the dancing twister that flattened his cornfield. How puny the old man’s gesture seemed from the Moon, punier still than the twirling gust itself.
And the others, standing huddled, would reflect on the benign and diminutive blue orb that hung above their barren plain on the Moon. The earthquakes grinding its eggshell crust, it’s raging cyclones, it’s battlefields, all silenced in the bright blackness of space, Earth would appear a convincingly unique and fragile body in endless space, suspended in tender equilibrium with itself. It would look very, very alone.
What have long struck us as extreme and unusual occurrences, would suddenly be reduced to events that are really, quite simply, “unremarkable.” Holding up our experience to scrutiny from this Moon perspective, we might be inclined to soften our exclamations a bit. The coddled existence we know within the cocoon of our pale, thin atmosphere is a far, far cry from the unimaginable extremes, the unthought-of phenomena, the unbelievable, the unthinkable that we would sooner or later encounter out there and beyond.
So, when the Moon is full and a dog howls and the tide runs full, sure, we mark it down on the calendar. It gives us something to talk about. But if we consider that this happens every 700 hours, it is hardly unusual. Rather, the occurrence of these full Moon events is so regular, so predictable, we can forecast them years in advance. That is what is remarkable; sailing as we are through the great void, among careening celestial bodies and exploding stars, we are able to live this placid existence, the clock ticking quietly on the mantle, and to read in the Farmer’s Almanac when is the best time of the month to plant peas.
WRITER’S REMARKS: This essay was written in 1992. It’s now 2024. I point this out because the world is changing in alarming ways, the way most people see it, and at a rampant pace; it is out of equilibrium. We have been talking about the “inconvenient truth” of this matter for much longer than we have actually done anything very meaningful about the problem. I, for one, yearn for the way it was, when the land and water, the weather, the seasons, the birds and the bees and the whole peaceable kingdom was consistently familiar… and in equilibrium with the lush blue and green world we were all borne to.
Natural systems tend toward equilibrium, it is their wont. We here on planet Earth have had the miraculous good fortune to be able to luxuriate through most of our existence in a friendly world, one in beautiful equilibrium. There is a lot of evidence, however, that tells us our planet has experienced numerous disruptions of that state, disruptions from both outside forces (the Sun, the Moon and impacting space objects) and “domestic rambunctiousness” (geologic tectonics, climatic and atmospheric see-saws). Some of them have been instantaneous events (meteorite and asteroid impacts), others plodding, lasting many thousands, even millions, of years (ice ages and glaciation; tropicalization; great sea-level fluctuations). We call such stretches of time by different names (longest to shortest: eon, era, period, epoch, age); take your pick. All of them were long-lasting between disruptions. All of them found their equilibrium. Earth, doing its thing, just kept twirling around the Sun.
Then along came humankind, a new force, the most recently arrived inhabitants of the Holocene epoch, going back only 12,000 years, which is a very short span of time as epochs go. The very last bit of it has been termed the “Anthropocene epoch,” sort of a sub-epoch. The Anthropocene, the time span over which mankind has had such a tremendous Earth-altering effect on our world as we’ve known it, is now decreed by a growing body of scientists to have begun in 1950! That’s 1950 to now, 2024! Just a lightning flash of time! Pretty sobering.
Knowing this has me wondering just how calming “A Moon Perspective” might be today. We’re headed back that way soon. Who knows?
Artist and author Barnaby Porter has had a varied career in marine research, aquaculture, and woodworking, among others. Most recently he partnered with his wife Susan as co-owners of the Maine Coast Book Shop & Cafe in downtown Damariscotta. In October 2021, Barnaby completed his tenure on Coastal Rivers’ Board of Trustees after six years of service.