The other night, the light already turned out, I crawled into bed. I’d already put my glasses in the nightstand; so, the moon, shining directly on my pillow, was a blurry, white orb through the window. Grabbing my glasses, the image resolved into a beautiful circle of snow, reflecting the light of the sun.
There are only two or three times in a year the moon’s arc and our bedtime coincide to give me a view such as this. And, unless I am exhausted, I always take a moment to lie there, take notice of the light reflected from some two-hundred and twenty thousand miles away. Light that, having traveled from the sun to reflect off the lunar surface, is almost ten minutes old.
The moon has been around for four-and-a-half billion years. It likely formed from the debris left when a Mars-sized planetoid slammed into our young Earth. Time and gravity allowed the dust and molecules trapped in our orbit to accrete into the orbiting body that lights most our nights. Like many things above us, it will be here for a long, long time. As the years pass, it’s orbit will grow larger, and it will sit farther away from our home. It will likely perish when our planet does, millions of years from now when the sun is in its death throes.
Every human I encountered during this past week, and will today, formed in a much less dramatic fashion than our moon. They’ve been around for far less time and will be gone in, as the Psalmist says, seventy years or, with strength, perhaps eighty. None of them, from the grocery store to work to the walls of my home, were anywhere near the distance Luna sits from my bedroom window.
Yet, they are just as unique. As our moon looks nothing like the other moons in our solar system, neither did anyone around me look like another. As the history of our satellite differs greatly from those of Jupiter or Saturn, so do the histories of each and every friend, acquaintance, and stranger.
And each person whose arc intersected with my own, like the moon in its phases, differed in the amount of light they reflected. Depending upon the day or week, they may have glowed brightly or been hidden in shadow.
Sitting here now, I can’t tell you about their light, shadow, or position. Unlike the shining celestial body that shone through my window the other night, I didn’t give their light, their presence half the attention. Those two or three minutes I looked out at the moonlight from my bed probably equaled the time I spent noticing all those who came within my orbit. Imagine the beauty I missed. What opportunities did I miss to see the divine light they allowed to shine through, to see and pray for those deep in shadow?
And as a satellite in their sky, I wonder, did I reflect more shadow than light?