By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Hunter’s Moon
The year’s largest supermoon, the October Hunter’s one — came and went last week.
“With the leaves falling and the deer fattened,” says the Farmer’s Almanac, “it is time to hunt. Since the harvesters have reaped the fields, hunters can easily see the animals that have come out to glean (and the foxes that have come out to prey upon them).”
Native American tribes know the October moon as the Travel Moon, Dying Grass Moon, Sanguine or Blood Moon. It is the nearest and largest of four supermoons that surround the solstice, a mere 222,055 miles away Wednesday, Oct. 16, at 7:52 a.m.
Around the world its appearance heralds the start of the Jewish Sukkoth and Hindu Sharad, Kumara, Kojagari, Navanna, Kojagrat and Kaumudi Purnimas.
For Buddhists it signals the end of Vassa and Pavarana. In Myanamar, it’s called the Thadingyut Festival Moon and marks the end of the Phaung Daw U Pagoda Festival. In Sri Lanka it launches Vap Poya, the Month of Robes.
So many names and spins for a once-yearly-moon common to us all. I say to-MA-to, you say to-MAH-to …
In the spirit of Tower of Babel-type discord, the Israeli killing of Hamas head Yahya Sinwar have made the Blood Moon blush. Benjamin Netanyahu called it “the beginning of the end” but “our war has not yet ended.”
Can the sin of war end? Kamala Harris said the death “gives us an opportunity to finally end the War in Gaza,” but there are a lot of ways to finagle that. “Final” and “end” are a double negative; they cancel each other out.
And why just the War in Gaza? There are plenty more fronts. I know! When that war “ends,” we’ll rename it the Plunder of Palestine or Battle of Blasphemies, … all in the Holy Land. Retribution in Spades when no forgiving, is the only language “they” understand.
“It is time for the day after to begin,” Harris said of, presumably, some form of resurrection. The moon rises monthly, our lives wax and wane, the world will go on without “us” if we live only single. There’s that prefix “sin-” again. Who doesn’t crave reassurance in the voting booth? Didn’t Biden name the October moon for his errant son?
Feeling a prodigal one myself, I started punning on “Suffering Sukkoth-as” and “Purmina Dog Chow” in Kojagari, Kojagrat, Kaumudi, Kumara, Kamala, even Kama Sutra flavors …, caramel colored as in colas.
The moon waxed big as Trump’s head till its carrot top started thinning on its upper-right quarter, still bright last weekend but waning.
Pre-election posturing. was not. In Saugatuck it is more like watching a chess match — Who can stay most moves ahead? — than a Sin War; whereas in Douglas you have to dig for it. Look under the culvert collapse on Ferry Street, the lead-lined “spaghetti” water pipes that link many homes, for toxins below the old Chase plant near impossible to dispose of or, alas, dispense with.
Also doing a face-plant was me when I tried dialing 222-055 for help, then recalled I’d forgotten a digit, likely in the middle of my right hand.
“Up yours” also played out for investors as stock indexes (different finger) reached new highs assured SpaceX would welcome home burnt-out profit launchers with outstretched arms.
It’s a crapshoot when candidates aren’t candid and shoot crap at each other instead. It piles high as “The Moon and Sixpence,” W. Somerset Maugham’s novel based on the life of French artist Paul Gaugin, who abandoned his career as a Paris stockbroker, home and family to go all-out painting with Vincent Van Gogh in Arles then, half an ear onward, Tahiti.
The moon speaks to us of like lunacy. Parked at a megastore Sunday post-sunset, I asked a woman taking cell-phone shots near my car, “Why? You think I hit you?” and she said, “No, the moon.”
It was beautiful, we agreed.
