Admiration: The Deep and Practiced Courtesy of Appreciating from a Distance - The Moon (Part I)

“Look at anything, whether foetus or field, in a diminishing way, and we have damaged it.” - John Moriarty, Serious Sounds

The Moon:

The full moon on a clear night.

This Great Grandmother of us all, the Courter of the Great Waters, the Fullness of Women and their emptiness too, the Great Mystery of the Sky.

When you look up at her sometimes it really hits you. She has been there for longer than we humans have been here.

Imagine the first human, turning their eyes skyward and seeing her. The countless nights spent, over countless generations, learning her ways of being herself. Her waning and her waxing. Her relationship to the deep waters and women's wombs. Her faithful changes establishing time and reminding us nightly, from where she is and how she is, when we are. The Great Matron of Cycles. The Heartbeat of the Twenty-eight Day Sky. The Thirteen Goddesses in one form or one in thirteen. It’s hard to tell.

She can teach us a great deal about admiration.

The next full moon, find a place to sit outside for a good long while and behold her. You'll only see so much at first. But the practice of admiration is not about trying to see more of the one you admire. It's about trying to see how little you see. It won't take long before the unanswerable questions begin to appear...

Why does she change every night when the sun does not change every day?

How does she move the oceans?

What is her connection to women's wombs?

What does she change in the cycles she does?

Who are her own mother and father?

Does she have any children?

Sit and let the questions come. Let the moonlight of everything you don't know about her wash over you.

So often in our lives, we march up to others as if we know them already. Or we look at them acquisitively, trying to figure them out, trying to know them once and for all, so that we can banish all remaining mystery.

But admiration asks us to wait and watch from a distance for a while, to let the mystery, those skittish birds scared off by our clumsy human footsteps, come slowly back towards us until we are sitting there, back against a tree, inside of all that we do not and can not know, the birds peering down on us from their branches.

We could do well to bring this understanding to our relationships with each other. To approach slowly and with an immense courtesy that signals to the other your lack of familiarity with their ways. We could look at each other in this way and be staggered by how little know. We could look at those we’ve known our whole lives like this.

Why were you made and who planted you here?

What's the story you were born from and into?

Is it ever hard for you to be alive?

What parts of you have yet to be seen?

Where do you feel misunderstood?

Have I hurt you before and not known it?

What food feeds you the most? And what grows it?

Let the questions arise. Drink from the cup of how little you know or, better yet, be willing not to drink anything for a little while. Hunger and thirst might just be the way that mystery, the midwife of all our learning, feeds us. Wonder might be the kind of food that keeps our minds sharp, our gaze soft and our body supple.

This society is so insistent of ending mystery. See if you can feed it again so that it grows ever larger. Or see if you can go hungry for a while yourself to notice how big it always was. Be staggered by how little you saw and how narrow was your view.

We live in a society obsessed with immediacy.

We all want to be admired.

But most of us never have been. Most of us have never really been on the receiving end of deep, well-practiced admiration. Nor do most of us, raised in this society of instant gratification, have much idea about how to admire another (though we might believe we have).

White people will say that their wearing of a sacred indigenous headdress is an expression of their admiration for the indigenous culture. Men will tell women the same as they cat call them. Somehow admiration has lost any sense of what the impact of its expression might be.

We live in a civilization that craves admiration and being famous. It seems hell bent on teaching us how to get it.

We've all fallen in love with someone only to wake up weeks or months later and see the mistake we made. We fell in love with their light and potential and missed their darkness. We've all been caught up in the whirlwind of hormones, arousal, alcohol, and the moment. In those times, many things can see like fine ideas only to be looked back at later (and often not that much later) with remorse. And it's not exactly that we went too far. It's that it went too fast. We ended up in a place we'd been to before but the journey was too rushed and left us uneasy.

We live in a time obsessed with immediacy.

We want to get things and get them yesterday. Limits are largely seen to be the enemy of our freedom and something to be overcome at best or eliminated at worst. It's a society obsessed not only with ‘getting’ but with increasing the speed of this acquisition. It’s a society steeped deeply in the idea that ‘if it's in the world it must be for us to have’. It's a society that turns living ones into dead things that can be controlled or purchased. It's a society that isn't big on waiting or on patience and certainly not patiently waiting.

Some of the best selling books, seminars and coaching promise results of how to get whatever it is you want faster. To get it more immediately.

And yet, when you explore the etymology of this word 'immediate' you find that it contains two central parts. The 'im' is a negating prefix. The other part 'mediate' is from the same root as 'medium' (the means through which something moves, the thing between us). And so the word immediate suggests 'no medium'. Or, said another way, 'nothing in between'.

This is the impulse of our society, to identify what is between ourselves and what we want and to eliminate it. Many of the approaches taught in selling and dating advice focus on this. How do we get what we want faster? How do we identify what's in between ourselves and the result we want (e.g. the sale or sleeping with someone) and overcome it? The impulse to 'get' is encouraged by this society as something we deserve.

And yet, the first casualty of this approach is often the well being of that which we claim to admire.

Part II - Etymology

Part III - Distance

Part IV - Consequence