Harvest moon
September rises like the harvest moon. In fact, according to EarthSky, a harvest moon refers to Earth’s lone satellite and its position in the sky.
“It is the full moon closest to the autumnal equinox,” EarthSky noted. An autumnal equinox is a what? Hmm, let me go around cyberspace once more.
“An equinox happens two times a year (around March 20 and Sept. 22), when the tilt of the Earth’s axis is inclined neither away from nor toward the sun, the center of the sun being in the same plane as the Earth’s equator,” according to Wikipedia.
I hope that’s clearer to you (I'm still digesting the data). All I can think of right now is "light and dark." Because of the moon’s position in the sky, there is more natural light at night during the harvest season. In the olden times, farmers in the West could go out to gather their ripe corn in the dead of the night.
This year, the autumnal equinox will be on Sept. 22, as pointed out by the Wikipedia. In the US, the full moon will fall on Sept. 29, EarthSky announced. In the Philippines it will be on Sept. 30.
There are a lot of beliefs and stories relating to the moon. There are corn dollies, created from the last sheaf of corn from the harvest.
People in the west believed that the corn goddess inhabited every field, every corn stalk. Reaping all stalks meant her disenfranchisement and death. So farmers took care of their patroness by weaving corn dolls where she could hide until the next season.
Filipinos have their own moonbeliefs. I heard an uncle of mine say, when I was a kid, that the best time to plant corn was when the moon was full and high.
Why am I barking at the moon? Maybe I am a werewolf with nothing better to do than to scare farmers out of their wits. Maybe I am a mouse looking for grain to silence my hunger. And maybe I am just a fool for the moon in all its phases.
As a kid I never believed the moon was made of cheese. Because I liked to play a game of marbles with my gang mates made up of boys, I thought the moon was made of yellow granite, badly pocked marked by meteors as they fell from the sky.
Meteors to me back then were wayward gods, cast down from some heavenly kingdom and banished to Earth as punishment. So what is the moon made of?
Space Today says the moon’s mantle is made of minerals olivine, orthopyroxene and clinopyroxene. I don’t know how these minerals look, but they do sound “hard,” like rock and granite. And so my childhood fancy was partly right.
The same uncle told me that I could hide the moon by placing my thumb close to my eyes. “Then, whenever you place your thumb close to your eyes, you will feel as if the moon were very small, very near you.”
As I lift my eyes to the hills and the skies, I always wonder about life Out There. But I can always place the moon close to me wherever I go.