Chapter 224: On Cloud Swings in Life and Sturgeon Moons

Under the Sturgeon Moon

“Lucy, if I gave you the sun and the moon, you’d ask for the stars as well,” Mum used to say.

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 really do ask for it all.

This morning, I waved off an old school friend flying back to teach in China. She brought a copy of Orbital by Samantha Harvey and a box of Krispy Kreme “Saturn rings” for the family. We ate them talking, as ever, about life, love, and the universe. She recalled a moment of connection in China when she realised the same sun shining there was shining here in the UK.

I know that feeling. Three years ago to the day, I stood in moonlight on a beach in southern Spain after hearing from my sister that our father had died. Xavier and our youngest came with me to the shore. We looked out across the water to Tangiers, the same moon over us as over him, the same moon that had watched over him when he stood on that beach seventy years earlier, newly engaged.

In a recent homily, or maybe a podcast, my mind slips, came this question: When have you stepped into the unknown 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 trapeze platform at National Circus, or published my first blog post, to setting sail from La Rochelle and somehow ending up in Sydney Harbour two years later, the pattern’s the same: fear, superseded by trust, that carries you through challenge and leads ultimately to joy, or at the very least the quiet satisfaction of survival.

Friday night’s adventure was a Full Moon swim at Shepperton Lake. Carolyn and I drove there in my “teenage Mini,” as old as my children and still full of magic. She had grown up just ten minutes away, so we crawled through rush hour revisiting her childhood haunts until the lake appeared, luminous under a setting sun.

No moon yet, but the water shimmered like glass. We slipped in and swam towards the blazing light, familiar yet unheimlich, uncanny. I could picture Dad there, ever the water-lover, saying, “This is the life,” heading towards the ultimate source of all.

The last ones out, we emerged giddy with laughter and sheer joy. Half a dozen of us, part of the “Tooting Tits,” an open-water sisterhood of sirens, shared lentil and caviar-flavoured crisps in true sturgeon spirit.

The moon finally appeared later, as I walked halfway down our street, bright, whole, and watching. I thought: You’re the same moon from Tarifa, from every thus. Like Tweedy in Giffords Circus: Moon Songs, I felt the clownish comfort of continuity.

Sunday brought an unexpected hangover from entertaining friends. I missed morning Mass, curling up instead with The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a story of love, loss, and survival. It reminded me of a friend’s father, a gentle man who had survived a Japanese POW camp. I wonder if that gentleness came from having looked into the void and stepped back.

In the book, the protagonist copies to his lost love: You burn me, you burn me. It recalled the jisei, the Japanese death poems that distil life’s impermanence into beauty. I understand that yearning to have it all, the sun, the moon, the stars. But our family motto reminds me: I shine, not burn.

It’s a delicate balancing act.

Yesterday morning, before my friend arrived, I finished We Are Still Here by Lamorna Ash, luminous writing, poetry in prose. She explores her bisexual Gen Z identity, faith, and performance. A young Quaker challenges her: is she commodifying her journey?

I felt the echo. Years ago, I questioned my right to write about circus, my makeshift religion when I’d felt distant from Faith with a capital F. Circus was my devotion, my discipline, my daring. It still is, part of my ongoing pilgrimage.

We made it to evening Mass, lighting a candle for Dad in the Lady Chapel. I thought of Stella Maris, Our Lady, Star of the Sea, and of Yemayá, patron saint aboard La Cigale, our boat, her envoys the dolphins that guided us at sea.

Ritual is its own trapeze act. In morning Mass, a hymn can send me swinging back to childhood, Mum and Dad beside me. Sometimes the sensation is so vivid I have to look up to the golden dove in the cupola and blink back tears.

Dad never had Alzheimer’s, though he lost short-term memory. That meant I could tell him the same circus or sailing stories again and again, honing the rhythm until he’d beam, “Did you really? Well, I never!” The best captive audience.

That last summer, I even brought my harp to play for him, still harping on in every sense.

Now, after a year’s enforced sabbatical for back surgery, I’m preparing to return to teaching, the job I love, the job that once broke me. But a lesser-known family motto I recently discovered reminds me: Broken, I rise, Fracta surgo.

Circus performers learn that lesson early, just look up #circushurts.

The night before the full moon, I dreamed of a tunnel, a pitch-black slide that opened onto a game with red and green bowling balls. The words in my head were, Just roll with it, baby. Only later did I learn that the Sturgeon Moon is also called the Green Corn or Red Moon. Perhaps the dream was echoing that, or maybe it was the buoys at Shepperton Lake, the red and green markers guiding our way through dark water. that were surfacing again in memory.

The arrival of the moon is said to mark  abundance and gratitude, a time to give thanks for what already is and release a few wishes to the deep.

So I’m giving thanks, imagining my yearnings already realised, and letting my inner Barnum rise again.

And you, reader, what do you wonder under this same moon?

Perhaps your question drifts into the night like a jisei, catching in silver light before dissolving into dark.

This is the life, on a boat called Serendipity, with a “dark and stormy”🍸  on the side. Cheers!