In the Shape of the Moon
Simple shapes, design, a rosehip, and a heron.
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Hello friends-
We’re coming into the final days of this in-between month (although, still in the midst of creative midwinter!), and I thought to round it off we’d take some final inspiration from one of nature’s greatest reminders that we’re cyclical beings: the moon.
Today marks the full moon, the first one of the year.
Wolf Moon, Old Moon, Center Moon, Ice Moon, Spirit Moon, Moon After Yule… the names we read and hear are derived from Native American languages and Old English sources, indicators of when those full moons occurred and what they meant for the communities watching them. Wolf Moon, for example, is said to be on account of the wolf cries as they wandered the winter landscape on the hunt for food.
How long have we been looking at the moon? How many seasons, how many generations, how many centuries? Staring up into the sky watching her cycles, celebrating her waxing and waning?
The other day I was on a late afternoon walk. I’ve been trying to get outside right around sunset, in order to catch whatever color display that winter has decided to put on. It was a blustery afternoon, big clouds moving in, the kind where if you stop looking at them for a few minutes and then bring your attention back, they’ve entirely changed.
As I left the beach, I turned to take another look at these moody clouds, or “emotional clouds” as I like to call them. Right there, in the last few moments when I hadn’t been looking up—instead focusing on potential beach treasures, dried pieces of bull kelp and such—the clouds had created a perfect opening in the sky, and right in the center hung the moon. Bright. Glowing. We might be used to her in the darker skies of night, but maybe she too wanted to make an appearance for sunset.
It had been overcast and socked in for several days, so the waxing moon had gone along without me noticing, until all at once, in this singular moment, she appeared. Taking over the sky and giving a little, “yes hello, I’m still here.”
I stared at the moon for a bit, as one often does. The glow is hard to turn away from. Still a few days from reaching its full peak, to the naked eye it already looked full. A silver sphere hanging in the sky.
I took the sighting as a cue to pay a little more attention. Where else could this shape be found? What else had I seen that day that reminded me of a full moon?
A deep wine red jellyfish whose interior looks like a brain.
A dried winter rosehip, which is what the moon would look like if she wore a crown.
A buoy floating in the saltwater.
An oil stain on the asphalt, circles of iridescent rainbow shooting out.
A soft and sage green lichen formation on a rock.
An yellow lightbulb inside an old metal lamp lampshade, reminiscent of old workspaces and shops, now simply sought after as adornment by lovers of midcentury modern.
All of a sudden the shape was everywhere. Yet again proof of the idea that when you’re paying attention to something, it can quickly take over your consciousness. A lens for taking in the world around you. The brain’s way of filtering and focusing.
When the moon is full and illuminated, our eye sees a perfect sphere, a circular orb suspended in the sky. I started to wonder what a full moon might have inspired across our human history. How many people have looked up and pondered that shape, tried to recreate it?
After all, a circle is one of the most basic shapes we have at our disposal. It is elemental. But despite the tricks our eyes play on us (which they do with regularity), the moon is not a perfect sphere. In fact, it’s an oblate spheroid—as is Earth—meaning that it’s kind of like a round ball that has been squashed and flattened.
Even the moon isn’t perfect, another good creative reminder for us: why are we so obsessed with perfection in the first place?
If you look to nature, it’s quite hard to find a perfect circle. Perhaps on the verge of impossible1? Mathematical abstraction may be able to easily create that kind of circular perfection, but in nature—while it might exist—it’s hard to say with certainty.
Whatever circles or spheres we find in the world around us, perfect or otherwise, they’re an essential part of our visual vocabulary. We’re drawn to them, we create them, we feel them.
“The first thing a child draws looks like a circle. People spontaneously arrange themselves in a circle when they need to observe something close up, and this led to the origin of the arena, the circus, and the stock exchange trading posts,” Bruno Munari wrote in the 1964 La Scoperta del Cerchio (The Discovery of the Circle).
If you’re a shapes lover (or in the Shapes Busines as
and I like to call it), you might enjoy getting your hands on a copy of Bruno Munari: Square Circle Triangle2, a compilation of his three essential shape texts: La Scoperta del Cerchio (The Discovery of the Circle), La Scoperta del Quadrato (The Discovery of the Square) and La Scoperta del Triangolo (The Discovery of the Triangle).Circle, triangle, square: the basic shapes that make up our lives. While squares are a mostly human endeavor, circles and triangles abound in the natural world. The circular moon is friends with flowers, the arc of a rainbow, the rings in a tree, and even sometimes ice.
On the same walk as the moon sighting, I also had an exchange with a heron.
I passed it a few times while I walked along the water’s edge, and each time as I got closer, the heron would look at me and then fly away and move further down the beach. Continuing on my walk, I would eventually catch up to wherever it had found a new place to stand, then it would eye me and fly away again. We did this for the length of the beach.
When I had stopped to admire the moon amongst the clouds I had forgotten about the heron, my mind occupied with the pinks and blues of the sunset. I walked out on the dock to get a view of the water from high above.
As I made my way back along the dock, the windy trees on the edge of the cliif up above me, I turned around for one final look at the water.
There, on a buoy floating in the water, the heron had landed.
As if it was perched on top of the moon.
-Anna
This is a watercolor by my friend and featured in our 2024 lunar calendar (which are still available!). And be sure to check out Roshni’s work here.
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When I was in high school, I went on an Outward Bound course, and one of my instructors would often say, “it’s not impossible, therefore it must be possible.” A liberating way to think about the expansive potential of everything around us.
Bruno Munari was a renowned artist and graphic designer, and he also penned an excellent book that a friend gifted me many years ago: Speak Italian: The Fine Art of the Gesture.
Beautiful reflection and love the first papercut 🌚
Lovely! This made me think that attention is love and when you're paying attention the world around us reciprocates. Thank you and Happy Full Moon!