02.11.2009 The photo below was taken at Medicine Lake in the Maligne Valley of Jasper National Park as I was driving to Edmonton along the Yellowhead Highway. These mountains and the full Moon figure prominently in a much larger narrative.
I was listening to Tapestry on CBC1. The first half of the show featured an interview with an Anglican bishop who wrote a book about finding the eternal in everyday life, and about how religion must reinvent itself to be more about this goal rather than social control and guilt. He discussed how living in love with someone was the closest thing to the experience of the eternal in this life because we would sacrifice our own lives for the other person. We override our own survival instincts and get completely out of ourselves to touch the eternal in that way. I looked up over the Yellowhead at that point and saw an incredible full moon rising over the trees. I quickly checked my rearview mirror, pressed hard on the brakes, turned off the radio, and stepped outside.
1.29.2010 I had just finalized plans to travel the following week to interview the director of the Vatican Observatory (a Jesuit with a PhD in cosmology) in Tucson, Arizona. I say just, meaning I had just closed the phone. I looked up from my desk and there was the full moon. I called a friend to describe what had just happened. She mentioned she had heard the astronomer interviewed on Tapestry a couple of months earlier. We checked the date of the episode and discovered it was 02.11.09. I should have kept the radio on and listened to the entire episode when I stopped the car to stare at the moon along the Yellowhead.
