FIELD NOTES: On the last Blue Moon...

...on the eve of 2010...I sorted decades of fabric leftovers into swatches, promising that perhaps I would turn the scraps into a work of art on the next Blue Moon...nice idea, but it came on Friday night...at an inconvenient convergence: the end overlapping the beginning...summer/fall/last month bills/next month bills/school/work...as difficult to sort as the last Blue Moon's bin of remnants...a lean summer equals too much month at the end of the money...head to table...and then I remembered the moon...I positioned the summer's lounge to face the blue light, scooped up the sleeping bag cast aside on the basement couch, grabbed my bed pillow and gloriously mooned until midnight...I didn't want to give in to inside slumber...why hadn't I planned a party?...the next Blue Moon won't be until 2015...plenty of notice to plan that party now...and you are invited!

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FIELD NOTES: So what exactly happened under that blue moon on New Year’s Eve?

Catching up on a Sunday morning

...to answer a question with more questions…what looks like busywork, but isn’t? A spider spinning? A bee buzzing? A bird building? A woman cleaning?...I went to my studio in the basement. It had become coated with dust not from neglect but from a certain unfortunate condition of busyness. Relatives were preoccupied with other things, but apart from that, it just happened that I was feeling more reflective than social and, moreover, was willing to embrace it even though that eve is intended for partying. The word ‘evening’ may mean the closing part of the day and the early part of the night, but the word ‘eve’ is not merely its shortened form; it brings with it other connotations. A second definition - its commonly acknowledged sense - is “the period just before some important event” or “a period of decline”. Imaginings of last light, owl-light, twilight, dusk, nightfall, soiree, sunset and the poetic gloaming are conjured. Who has not experienced how differently things look when you are in the dark?...I grabbed a bottle of Bellini, piped in some dusky jazz and pulled out an onerous bin filled with fabric scraps…probably some thirty years worth because I used to sew everything: shirts, skirts, gowns, pants, jackets, purses, pajamas, curtains, cushions, even dolls. The bin turned into a magician’s hat with endless strips from the striated layers of my life that I could color-date. A heap lay before me like a new map or fitted sheet impossible to return to its container once sprung. Midnight was on the march. Should I: Discard it and not look back until I discover I have nothing to show my grandchildren and no memory of my handiwork? Give in to burden and hang onto it like someone hiding in their obesity?...Neither...Though the blue moon ended up being hidden by cloudiness, it illuminated my night. I gathered the expensive or exotic specimens into a sequestered group, then folded the useful pieces that were big enough to actually be made into something and placed them strategically back into the bin. I took a sample swatch from everything that remained, editing this economically industrious period of my life into a small box. Before the ball dropped, I turned out the light, went upstairs and opened a bottle of champagne. The box of swatches will be reincarnated into a collage…perhaps…under the next blue moon…

FIELD NOTES: I am not fascinated by the moon for its science…

Last Sunday in December, 2009

...but for its mystery…and rhythm…for the comfort of its constancy and its reminder of a celestial presence far beyond my human comprehension. Under the moon I find illumination like no other…I indulge in imagination and folklore…I hope for the future and enjoin the idea that someone who is important to me (or perhaps will be important to me) is looking at it the same time I am…is thinking and feeling the same things I am…is as uncertain (or as optimistic) as I am. I try to think primitively, to empathize with ancients who explained the inexplicable with stories and assigned names in the absence of technology either to calm fears or wield power and how their images and words have stayed with us. On this New Year’s Eve the Full Long Nights Moon will occur, the second full moon in a month, and we still call it a Blue Moon. I like to use the moon as the pivot point of a drafting compass, scribing a perfect circle around the world where the reflection of the unseen sun is directed down in a cone of white light. On Christmas Eve, the moon with its top half covered in the first quarter peeked out like a flashlight from under the covers…covers where someone was reading secretly…silently…hungrily...forming their own hypotheses…making their own discoveries…in private, but for all the world to see.

FIELD NOTES: It is the night after the Full Cold Moon...

Christmas Eve 2007, through the window

...and as we travel under its ‘special effects’, we remark over and over how unreal this moon looks, unreal because it looks like something in the movies and we all know in the digital age we can no longer rely on what our eyes can see. My subconscious eye conjures an image of a great beach ball floating far on the horizon of an endless ocean with a figure on the shore; the figure in contentment faces the beach unaware that it will not be able to retrieve the ball at its convenience, not because it hasn’t the wherewithal, but simply because it isn’t paying attention. It has forgotten that the ball is in motion and miscalculated how far it must travel to meet it. One day a year, we strive, crave, hope for perfection in the special effects we call Christmas – we get only one take – but here before us in our man-made capsule, nature has trumped our feeble attempts, neither LED, incandescent or fluorescent can duplicate the illumination above us. A contrail shoots out to the right of the giant, glowing moon and I squeal with excitement that it must be Santa! It MUST be! I have chosen to forget that the children accompanying me are 17, 19 and 22…and so have they. I say the word ‘moon’ like I’m saying it for the first time…”Look at the Mooooon!”….like I have just unwrapped a surprise gift. Tonight, the moonlight is a surprise and a gift to all the earth and even though it is so very far away, I do believe in what I think I see.