Wolf Moon and the deep forgetting
Weekly Writing Prompt No. 84
Hello everyone and welcome to the first of my 2025 writing prompts. A writing prompt for anyone who has managed to avoid them thus far can never be right or wrong. Its only purpose is to help you exercise your creative writing muscle, and it does this by taking you out of your literary comfort zone and helping you explore a different side of your internal creative genius. So dive in, try something new and above all have fun.
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On the 13th of January, the UK will experience the first full moon of the new year. Often called the Wolf Moon when somehow, a wolf howling feels more redolent of winter, than the height of summer, a time when packs are leaning into each other for support through the lean times after herds have migrated and smaller mammals are snug in their hibernation hideaways.
It has also been known at different times and other places as the Cold Moon, Ice Moon, Old Moon, or the Celtic Quiet Moon and ‘Stay at home’ moon. Perhaps, the last is for obvious reasons (at least to me who prefers the fireside, a hot water bottle, a cosy blanket and a good book.
However, despite having many names for the moon, full or otherwise the moon seems to have become an abstraction, something that is ‘out there’, up in the sky not relevant in our day-to-day lives except as a conversation piece when China or India send missions to explore. According to Tim Ingold, we have lost our connection with the sky and the wider cosmos beyond it simply because we live indoors most of the time.
‘Perhaps it is because we generally think and write indoors that we have such difficulty in imagining how any world we inhabit could be other than a furnished room’1.
Rather like my statement of preference for a moon named ‘stay at home’, I too prefer to inhabit the indoor, enclosed space that shuts out the day and night skies equally. But I have learnt over the last few months, that the sky, the universe, the cosmos cannot be shut out entirely. In fact, it informs our very being at all times and when we cut ourselves off from it, we lose some essential part of ourselves in the process.
Most of us no longer need to pay attention to the movement of the sun, moon and planets to know when to plant crops as they all arrive packaged from the supermarket or in pots from the garden centre. Greenhouses mean any plant can be sown at any time. We don’t need the sun and moon to tell us the time or our location on Earth, we have phones, apps and satellites to do it for us. Navigation is at the click of a button or the wheel of a mouse, rather than by telescope, sextant or compass. Even meteorologists no longer need to predict the weather by looking at the clouds in a day sky. And our tides are measured by the tide tables and ephemeris rather than the phases of the moon.
It is easy to forget we are all marooned on a rock that rotates on its axis at close to 1,000 miles per hour. When we stand still it appears to be the sun, moon and stars which are wheeling above and around us2. But that is an illusion which for a long time much of the population of the earth accepted as truth.
Aristarchus of Samos (310-230 BCE) was the first to suggest that the earth orbited the sun3. However, his ideas were not accepted, probably because it was not convenient to see the earth as anything other than the centre of everything. During the Renaissance, Nicolaus Copernicus, re-discovered what had previously been known, that our earth was not the centre of all there was, instead we were simply a bit player on the side. Instead, our Earth orbits the sun, along with its companions in the solar system, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, later to be joined by Neptune, Uranus and Pluto.
To orbit the sun we travel at speeds of up to 66,000 miles per hour. and, it doesn’t stop there, our solar system also revolves in the galaxy we are part of at somewhere around 43,000 miles per hour and it takes somewhere in the region of 225 million years to complete a full galactic year4.
Our disconnection from the space around us, the space we inhabit when we aren’t looking at four walls has resulted in an outsourcing of our knowledge and intellect to technology. Charles Eisenstein put it succinctly yesterday when he published his article ‘Intelligence in the Age of Machines’:
When human beings outsource any physical or cognitive function to other people or to machines, that function may atrophy within themselves. New functions may open up, but at a price.
The knowledge we have lost through this dislocation affects so much of our lives, including our experience of the weather or religious and secular festivals. This loss of understanding that our planet is governed more by what happens above us than within and on it, has allowed all manner of explanations to take root about why the world is as it is, and what we should do about it. And, our collective forgetting has meant we once again believe we are the centre of the Universe.
Perhaps, all we need to do is go outside, look up, and remember how our planet and everything on it is an integral part of all that lies above us. In that awareness lies the space for the dreaming we all need to find our way through the times we live in.
The Prompt and Reflection
After dark, go outside for a few minutes and see what the heavens offer you. Whether it’s cloudy or clear doesn’t matter, just being outside in the dark, observing the sky and remembering where we are opens us up to a bigger creative energy, that of the universe itself. Write what comes to you, and then ponder on why that thought, those words, these feelings.
If you feel like sharing your thoughts please leave a comment as I’m always curious to read what everyone creates.
Mentoring
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With love, light, and laughter
Linda
x
(Image by Klaus Stebani from Pixabay)
Ingold, T. (2007). Earth, Sky, Wind, and Weather. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 13, S19–S38. (p. S29) http://www.jstor.org/stable/4623118.
https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/media/documents/resources/HowFast.pdf.
Grosu, E. (2019). The Heliocentrism of the Ancient: between Geometry and Physics. Hermeneia (Iași.), 23, 53–62. (p. 58).
https://nightsky.jpl.nasa.gov/media/documents/resources/HowFast.pdf