It’s late August. The nights come earlier now, they settle darker around the edges, the cloak of Autumn bedding in. I watched the Perseids meteor shower from the garden one stary night, the bats swooping overhead. Slow falling stars and fireballs shooting across the sky. Magic, if you know where to look for it. The fields are a gorgeous golden stubble, the crows congregating and the trees still deliciously, decadently green. They’re on the turn all the same. A reddening, a deepening from the hedgerows. Hips and haws and blackberries. We wander, my boy and I, fingers and mouths stained with their greedy, decadent purple. A burst of Autumn on the tongue.
August’s second full moon reaches its peak in the early hours of the 31st here in Ireland, and so today’s post is all about this rare Blue Moon.
A Blue Moon used to describe the extra moon in a season but due to a misinterpretation printed in an article in the 1940’s it is now more widely known as the second full moon in a calendar month. Given that a lunar cycle is just over twenty-nine days, once every thirty months or so (two years, eight months, and eighteen days) a month holds two full moons. Obviously, this can only happen if the first full moon falls within the first three days of the month, and our last full moon fell on the first day of August, so we will have another before the month is out.
However, if we track the meaning back further to the origins of its name, from the Old English ‘belewe’ meaning betray, we can find that this moon is indeed a Blue Moon. The betrayer moon was so named due to its ability to throw off the farming calendar. Autumn began, by the old ways, at Lughnasa at the start of the month, Septembers Moon must be the Harvest Moon as this is the name given to the full moon closest to the Autumn Equinox, the Full Moon after that falls before Samhain and the descent into winter, therefore this upcoming moon could be described as the betrayer, blue moon in the original use of the word. A moon out of place in the season, with the ability to trigger harvests too soon if not recognised for what it is.
The term Blue Moon has been in use for hundreds of years and is naturally used to denote a rare occurrence. Blue Moons, as in the famous song, are often linked to a chance meeting with a soulmate or a romantic encounter unlikely to happen again. However, Once in a Blue Moon tends to suggest a rarity greater than the actual regularity of this astronomical event. They are also linked to flooding, and two full moons in one month can create unusually high tides.
All of this, rare events and the potential interruption of the natural farming year, the betrayal of the natural rhythm of things, unsurprisingly calls to mind global warming.
‘Once in a lifetime’ weather events are becoming increasingly common, no longer rare but reoccurring. Records broken year on year for heat and rainfall. And as I track these ancient local names for the moons, so closely tied to the cycle of the seasons and the timing of agriculture I notice that they no longer fully fit. They many have in my childhood, but we have shifted the seasons, and disturbed weather patterns relied on for many thousands of years so severely that the calendar is increasingly out of sync.
Being a mother, trying to raise a child in awareness of his natural surroundings and the seasons, trying to raise a guardian of this land, makes it all the more keen. One of my favourite sayings is ‘we borrow the earth from our children’, we do not inherit it from ancestors, we are not entitled to it nor its resources, we are supposed to guard it. We have failed. In my generation and the one above there is still a shocking abdication of responsibility. It is someone else’s job to fix it. Someone else’s job to change their ways. There is blame shifting and cognitive dissonance on a stunning scale. It is perhaps easier to have this dissonance here in Ireland, we are one of the handful of countries predicted to be least effected by climate change. And yet we are still effected, our seasons and weather pattern shifts are leaving farmers struggling, the weather disrupting how things have always been done, ruining crops and we cannot yet feed ourselves. Our beautiful lough, eye of Ireland, great well of a forgotten goddess is dying, blue-green algae so thick it is choking out all life. A combination of pollution too long unchecked and once unusual, now regular weather, heat, and rain.
And we do not live in isolation. Globally we are collectively walking off a cliff and expecting someone else to stop us. Stephen Hawking has warned we may have as little as a thousand years left of an inhabitable earth. If we take this as fact, we are less than thirty-three generations from the end of human life on earth. It is a disturbing realisation. It is a betrayal of our ancestors and our children, and I find it difficult to integrate the anxiety and dread I feel, the scale is dizzying and too painful to fully look at.
And so, I dream. I dream of the end of the world. Anxiety fuelled nightmares of skies full of planes, food shortages and economic collapse triggering war on a global scale. I dream I am with a lover, in the rural west, on the edge of things, on the edge of what is left after the bombs fall. His family and mine packed into a house at the edge of the sea, desperately trying to coax the sodden land to sustain us. I dream of a cottage at the end, the walls growing cold as darkness reigns again. I dream of cities evaporated and safety only found locked behind deep walls. I dream my son cannot find his way, that the land under his feet can no longer hold him. I dream of floodwaters high through the streets, murky and wide. I dream the river is crying, an ancient goddess suffocating under bright, toxic green. I dream the earth has had enough and conspires against us, volcanoes, or tidal waves, plague and ice, I cheer her on although it means the life of all I love, and mine.
I know they are anxiety dreams, fuelled by the constant worry that comes with motherhood, the news cycle, and my reading material. Fuelled by conversations with friends who would change things too; beekeepers, farmers, writers, sailors, artists, parents, changemakers as imbedded in the land as I am. All of us at a loss in the face of it all. And yet I have dreamt too often true to fully dismiss them. I’ve written before of my Celtic propensity to see true, so when my mother, of the same old Irish blood tells me of the same dreams it does well to heed them.
Today’s story offering is three pieces of flash fiction, each fictionalising one of those dreams, of the end of the world, at least as we know it. And in the spirit of the Blue Moon each has a soulmate connection or a lover’s encounter twined through it.
*The first story’s title and opening line alludes to T.S Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Of Asterisms and Allegory to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.