Moon Yet

It’s that time of the year again—time to adjust around the cold. A huge wind blew in late in the day yesterday and kept up all night. I good sized tree limb, although not large enough to have done any real damage had it hit the cabin, and that looks a fine and hardy fellow except for being rather pale, landed between the fire pit and the cabin. As I look out the window, it sits as if pointing to St. Francis, who sits beneath my window, part of an idea (like so many I have that don’t come with a plan), of creating a shrine.

It’s almost October and the 50 degree weather in and out of the cabin is normal, perfectly appropriate for a Minnesota Fall, and I wonder if it was working half the summer, precisely half if you think of summer as June through August, that makes the change more unexpected than usual. It was, for all it’s shortness, a perfect July and August. I was so appreciative of being “out” (as if I’d escaped prison).

I had a vision three years ago. The shrine “idea” came from that. I speak of “vision” and “idea” newly since listening to the stories of Sandy White Hawk (with appreciation and also some envy). My friend Sandy was adopted away from her family and put in the “better” home of a white, Christian family. Her work now, her sacred activism, is in welcoming adoptees back to the tribe. It started with what she called an idea – the idea of having a song to welcome them back. She told her spiritual leader about this idea and he said, “That’s not an idea, that’s a vision.” Sandy told me how things unfolded after that. She was responsible for the vision – the resources of her small tribal community were there to support her. She’s brought this vision to fruition.

My vision, like all else in my life, was not so specific. It was about joining lands of peace, creating sacred space, and creating sacred friendships. It’s written in Creation of the New (which I’m only now adding to my website, so if you’d like to see it, check it out in a week or a month – I started this blog partially because website updates take time and money).

Although the word “shrine” came to me within the vision, I didn’t make much of it until my dad was dying. In one of those awful nursing home days when I was trying to get him a new bed after his quit adjusting for sitting and laying positions, and he was a little less than fully himself, and there were three of us “Perron” women in the room and in a bit of an uproar, he said, “Make a _______.” I must have asked him three times what the final word was and I thought at first it was “stink.” “Make a stink.” But it turned out it was “Make a shrine.”

Back track a year or so to when Donny was finishing up work on the cabin and my neighbor, Mr. Mooney, was repaving his driveway. A bunch of dirt was being dug up and he asked us if we’d like any of it. Donny decided it would be a great idea to make a little more of a yard around the cabin and had it dumped along the edge that joins our two yards. I was going to shovel it – distributing it evenly over the weedy growth between where it landed and the cabin. I did shovel some, but what was left was a mound about the size of a grave. After my dad died it became “Dad’s mound,” and his shrine.

St. Francis and other notables were going to dot its edges and flowers were going to grow like a blanket of snow across it. I got about as far with that as I did with the shoveling. St. Francis still sits in front of the cabin because I always thought I was going to do more with the mound – more planting, or more work around it. I didn’t, although my husband, just this year, planted moon flowers. Again this was about as good as it gets as my dad was enamored by the moon and would call me a few times a year to ask, “Did you see the moon yet?” After Henry was born, I’d take him out at night to see the moon and one of his first words was “moon” which got morphed into “moon-yet,” as we’d go out so often before full dark and I’d say, “No moon yet.”

You might say these cool outcomes came of a habit of allowing things to come, and it feels great, absolutely perfect, even divine, especially over time and with time’s ability to bring that “just right” feeling that tells you it turned out perfectly without your interference…until it begins to knock up against a feeling that you need to do a thing or two to help a vision along. Then “needing to do something” and “letting things happen as they will” begin to duke it out.

That feeling is always hovering in the background and it’s come to the forefront now for a lot of reasons: a new book coming out (and so things that need to be done), a desire stronger than ever before (since working, briefly, in the corporate world) to have a real vocation, and the way Andrew Harvey’s vision reminded me of my own.

Yet, if I know anything, anything at all, I know that this is the time to resist defining anything too specifically, to resist like hell the organizing/institutionalizing principal that has fueled the way we all once got things done. My constant question is “How do you do things newly?”

I suspect it’s like waiting for the moon. When there’s no moon yet, there’s no moon yet and, when there is a moon, you might need someone to ask you, “Have you seen the moon yet?”