The Moon:

I drove home last night going East on the 105 from Manhattan Beach to Whittier. I drove under the full moon, listening to Steinbeck's Travels with Charley on audio book. He describes autumn in New Hampshire, and how he asked a woman there if she ever got used to all the beautiful colors of Fall. The woman responded, "It is a glory, and always a surprise." That's how I feel about the Moon. Every time I see it, it surprises me, and takes my breath away--because somehow during the day I'd forgotten that it exists, and that while I'm working, and reading, cooking, and eating, it is slowly traveling back to my little corner of the world.

A couple of summers ago, my sisters and I drove down to the Main Library in downtown Fort Lauderdale, parked in a big parking garage next to the IntraCoastal and took an elevator up five floors to the top story of the Library: to see a Moon Rock--just a tiny bit of that luminous orb, entombed in a glass case in a little library on Earth. I stared and stared at it, marveling over the most foreign and far away assortment of matter that my eyes have ever seen. I wanted to ask it what it is like in outer space--whirling around in the emptiness, just a little bit closer to God than we are here on Earth.

Perhaps we love the moon not only for its mystery and beauty, but also for its barrenness. Perhaps the cold, silver starkness of its landscape makes our planet seem all the cozier. Steinbeck asks, "What good is warmth without cold to give it sweetness?"