Fun, full, fabulous Fourth of July weekend.

On Friday all four of us packed ourselves into ramonarjona's minivan and schlepped on down to Tacoma for the Tall Ships Festival. Our girls were faaaaaairly well-behaved, but their stamina cannot compare to that of Ramon's daughter, who is five, so we all left a bit earlier than they might have liked if left to themselves. But on the bright side, there were pictures of the two older girls standing inside a cedar canoe.


Awesome.

I was up at 3:30 yesterday morning nursing the wren, and remembered that right then would be during the "totality" of the lunar eclipse -- the second total lunar eclipse in 2007 so far. The first was in March, and we didn't get to see it here in the Pacific Northwest.

I do remember that particular full moon as being especially beautiful, however. I went to a concert with autumnbottom the night of the March full moon, and there was a misty "moonbow" of diaphanous colors surrounding the full moon like a halo on our way there.

Anyway, yesterday morning I was pretty tired, but I stepped out to gaze at the moon. How often does this happen? Not all that often.

It was rust-red and high in the sky, and its center was marked with a darker circle: the umbra. The color and the shape reminded me of the center of a bull's-eye. Or an old penny. Or a drop of blood flattened between two rectangles of glass.

I was reminded of the bit from Revelations 6: "I watched as he opened the sixth seal. There was a great earthquake. The sun turned black like sackcloth made of goat hair, the whole moon turned blood red..."

With its associations with waxing and waning (like pregnancy), its blood-red color during total eclipses, and the circle-within-a-circle pattern reminiscent of a nipple and areola, it's no wonder the moon is considered feminine in most cultures. I always thought it was odd that Tolkein made the moon masculine and the sun feminine in his mythos. It seems he took this from Norse myth. Here's a source I found on the subject:

One of the more interesting features of Old Norse literature - at least on the poetic and linguistic level, is the apparent gender role reversal of sun and moon. In Old Norse, the word for "Sun" (ON - sól) is feminine gendered and "Moon" (ON - máni) masculine. Throughout the body of Old Norse poetry, the sun is consistently referred to as "she" and the moon as "he." This contradicts, somewhat, a notion of the solar man and lunar female which recurs throughout Western literature, language, mythology and folklore.

(from http://www.heathenharvest.com/article.php?story=20060826081954436)

It's 5:50 AM, and I just saw the most amazing moonset I've ever seen. Actually, I can't remember if I've ever watched the moon set before. But now, I have.