Save a Secret for the Moon

One time I woke in the middle of the night and heard the muezzin, the “man who calls Muslims to prayer from the minaret of a mosque” according to the dictionary. The wailing melody in a language I couldn’t understand made me feel like I was on a far-away planet, or under water (I do study Arabic, but understanding sung versus spoken Arabic is a different thing). I felt startled and in my half-awake state was trying to understand what the sound was.

The sun setting so early makes me feel more isolated, more quiet, as if I should be hibernating like bears do. From the wide balcony area that I see every day when I step outside my apartment, the orange and yellow lights of Nazareth blink back at me. I take comfort in the pregnant yellow moon.

It reminded me of a song by The Magnetic Fields, “Save a Secret for the Moon.” The chorus goes:

When you love someone

You can’t always tell the sun

It will be twilight soon

Save a secret moon

It is interesting how much fear affects us. For example, last night I woke up in the middle of the night; I had been watching horror films with friends over the weekend and saw a particularly creepy one called “The Shining” with Jack Nicholson. It’s actually an excellent psychological thriller, but I kept seeing the image in my head of the two little dead sisters, and I felt super creeped out. I turned on the light (maybe you are laughing at me right now), and started thinking of the friends I had watched the movie with, and after a while the fear dissipated.

This morning, when my boss gave me back the previous draft of a grant proposal with a lot of changes to make, at first I felt on edge, like “oh no, how many mistakes did I make?” But of course this is a perfectionist mindset. I reminded myself of how much I love to write. I tried to think of the whole project as a landscape of words, and imagined I was a bird, looking out over the terrain. The only question was: how can I draw a logical map of this linguistic geography, with all of the details at the right pit stops? Someone is going to read this, and they have to be able to find their way to the conclusion.

So, just as Peter Pan would probably do, using the power of my imagination always helps. ;-)

I can’t believe it’s mid-November already. Chanukah starts the same time as Thanksgiving this year…

Some photos from TLV: