"Lucy, if I gave you the sun and the moon, you’d ask for the stars as well," Mum would say to Little My, as Dad called me. She might as well have been channelling Barnum’s wife, Charity, in The Colours of My Life: “Your reds are much too bold, I’ll take my greys instead…”
This weekend, under the Sturgeon full moon, her words have been looping in my head like an artist on a cloud swing, because sometimes I do ask for it all.
I’ve just waved off an old school friend this morning, heading back to teach in China. She came bearing a copy of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital and a dozen Krispy Kreme “Saturn rings” for the family. We ate them while talking, as ever, about life, love, and the universe.
She recalled a moment of connection in China when she’d been struck by the thought that the same sun shining over there with her was shining here in the UK.
I know the feeling. Three years ago to the day, on the shore in southern Spain, I stood in moonlight, taking it all in, after hearing from my sister that my father had died. Xavier, our youngest, and I came with me to the beach and we stood in the shallows, reflecting, looking out across the water to Tangiers.
And I thought: this same moon has been watching over him and my family in Petersfield this evening. I imagined our father on that same beach seventy years earlier, in the 1950s, on the trip where he proposed to my mother. And yesterday, the sister who rang me with the news three years ago shared, on the Sisters WhatsApp, her own moon-over-water photo from where she’s currently on holiday. Funny old world, as Dad would also say.
In last night’s homily at church, or perhaps it was a recent podcast, my mind is slipping, the question was posed: When have you stepped into the unknown, not known where you were going… and it was a disaster?
The answer, if you’ve ever trusted the net, the water, the loving force beneath it all, is never. From the first time I stepped off the platform for the petit volant trapeze at National Circus, or published a circus blog post, to setting sail from La Rochelle for two years into the unknown and somehow ending up in Sydney Harbour on New Year’s Eve, the pattern’s been the same: fears, challenges, and ultimately the most incredible adventure to celebrate.
Friday night’s adventure was a Full Moon swim at Shepperton Lake. Carolyn and I drove there in my “teenage Mini,” so called because it’s as old as my teenagers and, like the best circus props, still works its magic.
We crawled through Friday rush hour, revisiting Carolyn’s childhood haunts as she had grown up ten minutes from Shepperton, as the boat rows, and rewinding memories until the lake appeared: a luminous ring under a setting sun.
No moon yet, but the water rippled to glassy.
We slipped among the satin sheets and swam towards the blazing light. It was both familiar and utterly unheimlich, uncanny. I could picture Dad there, ever one to embrace water, saying “This is the life” and then heading towards the ultimate source of all.
The last ones out at 8.01pm, we emerged from the lake giddy with laughter and sheer joy. There were half a dozen of us there, part of a wider group of Tooting Tits and open water swimmers, an inclusive life-embracing sisterhood of sirens.
I’d brought lentil crisps which balanced out the “caviar crisps” Bronnie had brought, that we’d gamely tried in sturgeon spirit.
No sign of the blimming moon on the drive back, even with the roof pulled back. Finally, I found it walking halfway down our street at the witching hour, and there it was, bright and whole.
I looked up and thought: You’re that same moon from Petersfield, from Tarifa, from years ago every thus. Like the clown in this circus of life, mooning around (remember Tweedy in Giffords Circus show Moon Songs?!) thanks for the continuity.
Sunday brought an unexpected hangover from entertaining friends the night before. I missed morning Mass, curling up instead with The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a story of love, loss, and survival that triggered a memory from school days — of a friend’s father who, like the protagonist, had been a prisoner of war in a Japanese camp and had written a book about his survival, albeit after being taken out three times in mock execution.
I remember only his height, his glasses, and the gentleness in his manner and wonder if that kindness was shaped, at least in part, by having looked into the void and stepped back.
In the series, the protagonist copies out over and over to a lost love: You burn me, you burn me. It called to mind the jisei, the death poems of Bashō and other Japanese poets, distilling life’s impermanence into a moment of beauty. I can relate to that same all-consuming yearning to have it all, for the sun, the moon, the stars…But our family clan motto is I shine, not burn.
It’s a delicate balancing act, really.
Yesterday morning, before my friend arrived, I finished We Are Still Here by Lamorna Ash while basking in the
Yesterday morning, before my friend arrived, I finished We Are Still Here by Lamorna Ash while basking in the garden. Her writing is stunning, student of the verse of Gerard Manley Hopkins, her writing is extraordinary, liquid poetry in prose, like Harvey’s.
She explores where her identity as bisexual Gen Z sits, visiting and interviewing a number of Christian communities, and as a writer, the performative aspect of faith. At one point, a young Quaker adult challenges her writing as a commodification of her journey.
I felt the echo. Years ago, I questioned my own right to write about circus, which, after all, was my religion at a time when I felt particularly distanced from my Faith with a capital letter. Circus became my life-giving all, teaching me to be brave with every trick in training, every post shared publicly for over a decade.
That spirit, the risk, the discipline, the devotion, the compulsion, is still part of my ongoing pilgrimage.
We made it eventually to evening Mass last night, lighting a candle for Dad in the Lady Chapel. I think of Stella Maris, Our Lady, Star of the Sea. Yemayá in Cuban Santería, our patron saint onboard La Cigale, whose envoys were ever the dolphins on passage.
Ritual is its own trapeze act. There is no singing in the evening service, but in the morning Mass a hymn very often can be a cloud swing back to childhood when Mum and Dad were next to me, the age I am now. I can reach out to them, right there. Sometimes the sensation is so immediate, so vivid, that I have to look up to the ceiling, where a golden dove sits in the cupola, and blink back the tears.
Dad never had Alzheimer’s, though he lost his short-term memory; and that meant I could tell him the same circus or sailing stories again and again, honing the timing until they landed just right. “Did you really? Well I never!” The best captive audience ever. .
That last summer, I even brought my harp to play for him, still harping on in every sense.
Now, after an enforced year’s sabbatical for back surgery in April, I’m preparing for my return to teaching in the school classroom. The job I love broke me in the end, but a lesser-known family motto I discovered last week (in a book on the Scottish clans a friend from home dropped round to Mum's) reminds me: Broken, I rise, Fracta, surgo.
I’ve learned a lot over the past year, and my vulnerabilities make me stronger. Circus performers learn that lesson early in their career, you need only check out the hashtag #circushurts.
As if to bring that home, last night, in a dream with a surreal Hunger Games edge, I was invited to push myself into a pitch-black slide tunnel. The only way forward was to take a deep breath and drop into the enveloping darkness, relishing the stomach flips, heart in mouth, yet remembering to keep breathing, 4-7-8.
At the bottom? Stop. Go. A game of picking out a red moon and a green moon from among the sea of white balls and bowling each one successfully through hoops. The lyrics popped into my head: “Just roll with it, baby…” And this Sturgeon Moon made manifest in miniature. became another reminder to go with the flow.
The Sturgeon Moon, which can also be called the Green Corn Moon or the Red Moon, is said to be a time for abundance and mindset: a moment to be grateful for what’s already here, and perhaps to release from the depths a few wishes to set afloat.
We’re still in the grace period, and I find myself leaning towards giving thanks for what I already have, and imagining my yearnings as already realised, releasing my inner Barnum to the surface once again. And I’m curious about you, reader: what do you wonder, under the pull and ebb of this same moon?
Perhaps your question drifts out into the night like a jisei, catching for a moment in the silver light before dissolving back into the dark.
This is the life....on a boat called Serendipity, and a "dark and stormy" on the side. Cheers!
