Touched by the Moon--Nirmal Gbosb

Driving to a friend's house on a recent evening, I was awe-struck by the sight of the full moon rising just above Manila's rooftops, huge and swollen, yellow through the dust and smoke of the city. I stopped to watch it for a few moments, reflecting on what a pity it was that most city dwellers—myself included—usually miss sights like this because we spend most of our lives indoors.

My friend had also seen it. He grew up living in a forest in Europe, and the moon meant a lot to him then. It had touched many aspects of his life, including those concerning his ordinary daily life. For example, when he had to make sure that he had his torch with him when he was outside in the evening, or when the moon was due to rise late or was at its newest—a bright, distant sliver of white like a chink of light below a door in the sky.

I know the feeling. Last December I took my seven-year-old daughter to the mountainous jungle of northern India with some friends. We stayed in a forest rest-house with no electricity or running hot water. Our group had campfires outside every night, and indoors when it was too cold outside. The moon grew to its fullest during our trip. At Binsar, 7, 500 feet up in the Kumaon hills, I can remember going out at 10 pm and seeing the great Nanda Devil mountain like a ghost on the horizon, gleaming white in the moonlight and flanked by Trishul, the mountain considered holy by Hindus. Between me and the high mountains lay three or four valleys. Not a light shone in them and not a sound could be heard. It was one of the quietest places I have ever known, a bottomless well of silence. And above me was the full moon.

On the same trip, further down by the plains, we stayed in village style clay huts at the edge of a wheat field, with a cold river tumbling over rocks a few yards away. Late at night, underneath the full moon, everything seemed bathed in a quiet supernatural light, and we could see the stones in the river, and watch the deer and antelope crossing, almost half a kilometre away.

I also remember sitting on the beach at San Antonio in Zambales, one night in the Philippines about two years ago, watching the South China Sea hiss against the sand. The full moon rose and hung over the sea like a huge lantern in the sky. I felt as if I could walk up and touch it.

Last summer, on another trip, I met the caretaker of a rest-house at Chitkul, 11,000 feet above the plains at the top end of the Sangla valley in the Indian Himalayas, two days' walk from Tibet. We sat in the sun looking at the scattering of stone-tiled roofs, and the stony valley climbing away between the mountains towards Tibet, leaving behind the small, struggling vegetable patches planted by the farmers and herders of this, the last village before the border. We were a thousand feet above the tree-line; every winter the place is covered with several feet of snow.

The caretaker was a local, an old man with the craggy face and thin beard typical of the high plateaus. He didn't have a watch or calendar—nobody in that village of less than 200 people had one. I asked him how he knew which month it was. He turned and pointed to the row of snow peaks towering above us across the valley. "When the morning sun falls first on that peak it is January," he said. "When it falls first on that second peak it is February, and on the third it is March and so on."

The cycles of the sun and moon are simple but gigantic forces which have shaped human lives since the beginning. Wise men and women studied them not as scientists, but as mystics; ancient communities worshipped them. Today so many of us miss this experience because we are inside cars or houses all the time.

We have lost our sense of wonder at the elements—our lives are full of forces that are so new and barely understood that we are confused shadows of what we should be.

Today our lives are defined by glass, concrete, metal, plastic and fibre-glass. We eat and breathe things our bodies were not designed to process. We have televisions, Xerox machines, cell phones, pagers, electricity, heaters and ovens and air-conditioners, cars, computers and remote controls. Energy flies around us. White noise and pollution is in the air. Radio waves and strange harsh lights are constantly drumming into our minds and bodies.

Struggling through traffic that evening in Manila at the end of a tiring day, most of it spent indoors, I saw the moon and remembered these things. And I thought: before long, I would like to live in a small cottage in the Himalayas. There I will grow vegetables and read books and walk in the mountains—and perhaps write, but not in anger. I may grow old there, and wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled and measure out my life in coffee spoons. But I will be able to walk outside on a cold silent night and touch the moon.