A line from Joan Didion’s “The White Album” came to me while taking another picture of the moon tonight:  “I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full.” It’s the third night this week and probably not the last.

I’ve found myself in a loop of repetition before

The last time was when my Dad died in February 2012. Leaning on my balcony rail looking at the homely mountain, I opened a bottle of bubble mix we’d bought for my nieces and blew a few streams of bubbles into the still summer False Bay afternoon. They floated and eddied on gentle mountain vapours and glided on for ages until dwindling away.  So I blew some more and when a breeze rose from the ocean, it pulled them into an upstream high, high – almost as high as the swallows like specks hunting above me.

For a few weeks it became a daily ritual: I refilled the bottles and blew bubbles. On windy days they’d speed up in a spiral then turn to flow in an incandescent stream towards Lakeside. There was a day when a spiteful and fitful breeze pulled them straight down onto the lawn where they popped around my neighbour’s aged cat and her posse of grazing ibis.

Then it was over

I haven’t thought it about before: perhaps I needed something innocent to act as a circuit-breaker on shock and grief, or something repetitive that takes all your focus – even just something lovely to look at. Maybe it was all three.  

And here I am again, in another kind of loop

This time I’m captivated by dramatic winter night skies, either tumbled with broken cloud-castles or translucent midnight blue, all lit with different phases of the brightest moon.

It’s not about the moon or the sky, no.

It’s about something higher, lovelier, older, and more steadfast than the yammering ugliness below.

In a time when we seem to be descending into and drowning in a sea of information – information we can’t process because we’ve mislaid the translations – looking up helps me to look away from the madness.

This year we’ve discovered that control is tenuous at best and non-existent at worst. The cycle and beauty of something outside of us altogether brings me calm.

So, that’s why the moon and sky pictures are happening right now.

Thank you for watching.