The Moon is a Woman

And I Am the Moon.

The Waves leap off my Mind

And my Heart pounds with excitement.

© 1964 Laurel Airica

Where WordMagic Comes From

According to the 15th C. English printer, publisher, translator and author, William Caxton, native speakers of English were as if ‘born under the domination of the Moon.’ That certainly fits my experience.

Caxton, I believe, was commenting on the mutability of English in the multitude of forms in which it existed at that time whereas my own sense of being ‘tied/tide’ to the Moon is something very different. It relates to how compelled I have felt throughout my life by my relationship with both the Moon and the English language, and how strongly I’ve desired to discover how and why we three connect so strongly.

Selenotropism: Growth in Response to Moonlight
As a child, I had many questions that seemed so basic to me that I did not dare ask them for fear of revealing how backward I was. After all, I reasoned, how could one live a life until these fundamental issues were resolved? Given that everyone around me was going about their lives without apparent disturbance, it seemed, I assumed that they must have long since figured things out. And if I could just ‘read’ their behavior, I could intuit their conclusions.

There is just one question of this nature that I still remember from those early years—and I remember it only because I read it years later in a novel by D.H. Lawrence (perhaps it wasThe Rainbow). In my recollection, a young woman, while embracing a soldier, feels her heart contract inside her like a hard, cold bead.

I was so familiar with that painful feeling and so relieved to know that I was not the only one who had ever felt that frightening tightness. The young woman in the story then wonders to herself how she can possibly come together with another human being until she has centered the Moon in her own being.

‘Yes!’ I thought emphatically. ‘Now why don’t people talk about that?’ That question continued to puzzle me for years—in part because I did not know whether the centering process was meant to be literal or metaphoric. Years later, I discovered it was a literal experience that the Moon, Herself, initiated. But that’s a story for another time.

I had a number of other profound lunar synchronicities. Yet I still do not know the depth of interconnection I share with the Moon and the English language. I suspect I will be exploring this for as long as I’m incarnate on this plane. What I do know is that I envision the possibility of turning the tide on the ‘See of Human Consciousness’ so that we are no longer the instrument of dead ideas embedded in the letters and words to which we give life as we speak and wRite. Let us, instead, create a global movement for linguistic improvement that enables us to speak into existence a whole new world of possibilities:

For if our words so melt the heart
they start the Milk of Humankindness flowing
– so that any time we speak our mind
we set another flower growing –
then I believe, before our very eyes,
we human beings, like butterflies
will fully metamorphosize.

from Open Heart Synchrony

As a daughter
of my Mother Tongue,
I’m old as Earth – thus Ever Young;
and blessed with alchemystic gifts to write transforming hieroglyphs
and speak, whenever She elects
those L-M-N-tal dialects
by witch the Savage Beast is charmed
and human animosities disarmed.

But to do so,
I first turn to the Moon and I ask to be filled
with Her lambent light love songs and sylvan refrains.

Then,
Her poetry flows to me like liquid spilled
from the milky white vessels
of silvery veins.

Her kinetic,
prophetic, alphabetic poetics
– with their holo-grammatic logo-rhythmic magnetics
and ecstatic electro-acoustic phonetics –
have the power, I am told, to attain that threshold
at which base mettle changes –
from mere led to pure goaled!

from Meta-Poetic-Logo-Rhythms

Very few people are aware that we can unite with the energies of Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Space and that they can provide us with the highest intensity of intimacy that a person can experience. One of the deepest pleasures and joys available to a human body comes through extending our recognition and appreciation into other worlds and then letting ourselves get carried away.” Tillak