Nightstalkers

I wake and spend
the last hours
of darkness
with no one

but the moon.
She listens
to my complaints
like the good

companion she is
and comforts me surely with her light.
But she, like everyone,

has her own life.
So finally I understand
that she has turned away,
is no longer listening.

All of us at one time or another, have periods when we cannot sleep. Life provides lots of experiences that can keep you up at night. One dear friend says her children call her 'the nightstalker' for her reoccurring restlessness in the middle of the night. I think that name suits the malady perfectly. I have my own theory about it. I think it is worst when the moon is waxing. Its power is legend to influence our hearts and minds. The pull it exerts on the tides of the earth also pulls on the life pulsing through us. I've watched it while rocking newborns, as it rises over oceans and lakes, while sitting up with the sick and the dying and on those nights when worry would not let me rest. Somehow being up in the night and seeing it's graceful shape, whether it is waxing full in expectancy or melting away in sorrow, I have felt comforted. And who among us has not at one point or another lifted our jumbled thoughts and poured them out under the moon's white stillness? Every life has nightstalker moments. The moon is only one of countless places in the great beautiful world outside where we can feel safe enough to pour out the contents of our hearts and leave lightened and strengthened to carry on.

She wants me
to refold myself
into my own life.
And, bending close,

as we all dream of doing,
she rows with her white arms
through the dark water
which she adores.

Mary Oliver, "Moon and Water"

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