Daryl Wood's Blog

Several years ago I wrote a post called Halfway Between The Sun and The Moon. It was a longer than usual post so I don’t know how many people read the whole thing. I did this morning and it still holds as an anchor to so much of what my life has been and is on Eagle Harbour. Today, in the early morning hours in my kayak I hadn’t even realized there was a full moon until I floated in the big water waiting for the sun to come up. I drifted around looking at the beautiful colours of the sky when I saw her – the full moon slowly peeping out from a band of clouds. She was low in the western sky and eventually fully exposed. It got me thinking.

She was there even if I couldn’t see her. As was the sun that I was waiting for. What else was and is ‘there’ even if I can’t see it/them? And how opportune to have the clear reminder of that morning in 2021 when I had first found myself on a remarkably still Lake Huron halfway between the sun and the moon. How different life was then.

Sitting in the stillness I wondered if I could ‘hold’ all this beauty and reverence. I didn’t have anything to take a picture with and no one with me to share the experience. It would just be me and the wonder I was seeing and feeling. I knew I would come home and write about it because I write about things that touch me deeply. And I wondered if that’s why people are so active on social media (I am non existent there). Perhaps they long to be seen, heard and belong. And I know that my aching loneliness for my beloved Doug is a catalyst for some of what I do – writing, talking, sharing, connecting. It is that longing to belong and share the full range of what this amazing world has to offer. It is seeing and feeling such profound emotion in these early hours that feels too much for one heart to embrace. In a strange coincidence that’s how the painful grief feels – too much. If I can hold one, can I hold the other?

So I wrote and waited to see if I wanted to share. In my 2021 Halfway post I noted that the retelling of the story diluted it in some way. What I know for sure right now is that I soaked up the holiness of that time this morning when the lake was sacred still and I was breathing in life halfway between the sun and the moon.