DK Moolight Video shot at 5:00 am. this morning at Cove Island Park. More pictures of the amazing full moon and clouds here.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
…Sit your old bones down, because I’ve got bad news: you probably look older than you think you do. Don’t shoot the messenger – blame science. A recent study published in the journal Psychology and Aging found that 59% of US adults aged 50 to 80 believe they look younger than other people their age. Women and people with higher incomes were slightly more likely to say they thought they looked fresher than their peers; and only 6% of adults in the bracket thought (or realised) they looked older than others their age. In short, most of us are delusional.
While the survey only included people over 50, I reckon they would have got the same results if they polled anyone over 30. Our brains have inbuilt denial mechanisms that stop us confronting our own mortality. Many people’s biological age tends to differ from their “subjective age” (or how old they feel). Mine certainly does: according to my passport I’m 40, but in my head I’m still a sprightly 29.
I’m not totally deranged. I regularly have moments where I am reminded of my passing years. Eating in a restaurant tends to be one of them. Have restaurants become louder recently? Or have I just got more intolerant of noise? Either way, I’m pretty sure I didn’t grumble about decibel levels in my 20s.
My skinny jeans (which you will have to pry off my geriatric-millennial pins before I wear barrel-leg trousers) are also a perennial reminder that I am tragically over the hill in the eyes of gen Z. Then, of course, there are the newfangled random aches and pains – and the fact that I can now get a three-day-long crick in the neck simply from turning my head too fast.
Aches, pains and fashion faux pas aside, however, nothing makes me feel older than other people my age. I’m not talking about people I see regularly – you don’t really notice how they’ve matured. I’m talking about having an acquaintance from school or university pop up on social media and realising, with horror, that the fresh-faced teenager you remember is now an ancient-looking adult. “Surely, I don’t look that old?” I mutter to myself on those occasions. “Surely the ravages of time haven’t been so cruel to me?” Then I study myself in the mirror and realise, oh dear, they have.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m not saying getting older – or looking older – is terrible. Far from it: ageing has many perks. I used to be terribly self-conscious and, in my 20s, I would rarely leave the house without makeup. Now, I no longer have any proverbial ducks to give, and run errands looking like a scarecrow. I wear makeup so rarely that, when I do, my dog becomes instantly alarmed because he knows something weird is up. It’s liberating to no longer care what people think…
Internalised ageism doesn’t just harm your wallet and confidence; it can hugely affect your health. Indeed, a study from 2002 found that people with more positive self-perceptions of ageing lived 7.5 years longer than others. Embrace your subjective age, in other words. There’s a lot of truth to the cliche that you’re only as old as you feel.
Susan Photo of Wally and me. Didn’t fit at all with this passage except for my receding hairline, my gray hair, my “paunch” covered by Wally’s private parts, my face wrinkles, the deep bags under my eyes, and the seat cushion that is doing its best to reduce chronic lower back pain (and other unmentionables). Outside of all THAT, I feel less than half my age.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Full Moon over Cove Island Park. 5:59 am, March 25, 2024. 30° F, feels like 23° F, with wind gusts up to 20 mph. More Full Moon photos from this mornings walk here…
718 days. Almost consecutive. Like in a row. Morning walk @ Cove Island Park @ Daybreak.
Ritual is all we have. It’s what keeps us from the abyss.” It’s Jillian Horton’s thought from “We Are All Perfectly Fine,” and there’s zero doubt that she wrote it thinking of me.
Perfectly Fine?Definitely not.
I round the turn into the parking lot. It’s empty. I mean Empty. Not a single parked car. Not a single soul lurking around.
My park. My time. Mine.
I walk.
45° F with 10 mph winds blowing from the NW, keeping this Spring’s Here thing real.
Inhale.
Blossoms.
“…as if a rose were flung into the room, all hue and scent” (Szymborska).
And then, came the Trifecta.
(The first being here, alive, standing in this spot, at this moment.)
The second, Luna peaks out from behind the clouds. And drops her beam down on Long Island Sound.
And the third, at this exact moment, turning up randomly on my iTunes playlist of 3000+ odd tunes — My Anthem. Van Morrison, So Quiet in Here.
Where we can be what we want to be Oh this must be what paradise is like This must be what paradise is like Baby it’s so quiet in here, so peaceful in here So quiet in here, so peaceful in here So quiet in here, so peaceful in here So quiet in here, you can hear, it’s so quiet
I raise my camera, focus on the train of her gown, and take the shot.
I’m going to remember this.
Notes:
DK Photo. Moonlight @ Daybreak. 5:15 am, April 23, 2022. 45° F. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT. More photos from this morning here.
I’ve been getting text messages from the moon. A note flashes on my phone, asking if the moon can track my location, and I consent.
I have moved to a new city but the moon is following me around. It texts to tell me when it will be out. Through the windows, there is just a parallelogram of sky at the top of the courtyard, only a small space to catch the passing moon on certain clear nights…
The app uses my location to tell me the moon’s phase, direction, distance at all times. Right now, the moon is 384,012 miles away from my hand, which is holding my phone close to my heart, as I sit at the table in the narrow kitchen of this flat with tall windows in an old-style apartment block, stinging nettles by the front door. I’m just home from work, vibrating with tiredness. The moon is waxing gibbous and is 25.2 degrees above the horizon, almost due east. It rose just after midday and will set around 3 a.m…
The internet is hectic and I go to the moon to relax, opening new browser tabs for the moon’s Wikipedia page and Google Maps of its surface. I follow new lunar developments from NASA. I learn that the moon was probably once part of the earth, sheared off by an asteroid. B, who moved from Scotland to Tasmania, tells me that there is a different moon in the southern hemisphere: it waxes and wanes in the opposite direction. I learn that the moon is slowing down the earth’s rotation. The moon is holding on to us…
I’ve run away but I find the moon everywhere I go…
The lunar cycles are almost all I have in my diary for the year. My future is blank but I know what the moon will be doing…
People in this town can’t commit to anything, but the moon is always orbiting and the months pass relentlessly. I don’t speak the language but I know ‘der Mond’. My attachment to the moon grew during the years I’ve been lonely and so did the moon’s attachment to me. The moon, I tell B, is my boyfriend.
— Amy Liptrot, from her Prologue titled “February Hunger Moon” in The Instant (Canongate Books, March 3, 2022)
Notes:
Waning Crescent Moon (25%). DK @ Cove Island Park, 37° F. 5:33 a.m. Sunday, March 27, 2022. More Photos from this morning here.
Live & Learn 