Whispering Wyrd

My grandmother had little in the way of formal education by today’s standards. She didn’t get a 4-year college degree. She never owned a car. My grandparents had an outhouse until my father and his brothers finally built them an indoor bathroom. She didn’t get a telephone until I was already a teenager.

And yet my grandmother knew the moon.

She knew which days were best for planting and which ones weren’t. She knew when the weather was about to turn, even when the sky still looked calm to everyone else. She could step outside, feel the air against her skin, and seem to read something written there , something invisible to most of us.

She never called it wisdom. She never tried to teach it in any formal way. She simply lived it.

When my mother was pregnant with me, my grandmother told her the exact day I would be born, not based on a doctor’s prediction or a calendar, but on the phase of the moon. And she was right! To this day, I still think about that, half in disbelief and half in reverence.

I was born during the new moon, in the quiet darkness just before the light begins again, the time of endings and beginnings living on the same breath.

I don’t believe that the moon determines a person’s entire life. I don’t think our paths are written in stone by the sky. But I do believe the moon holds memory. I believe it carries rhythm. And I believe that some people, like my grandmother, learned to listen and gained much wisdom.

She didn’t read books about weather patterns or lunar cycles. She watched. She paid attention. She lived close enough to the land that the land spoke back to her.

She watched the animals, the clouds, the soil, and the way the wind moved through the trees. Over a lifetime, that observation became ways of knowing.

There is a kind of intelligence that doesn’t come from schools. It comes from relationships. It comes from being in conversation with the living world.

I didn’t realize the depth of her knowledge while she was alive. Like so many things in my youth, I took it for granted. I didn’t think to ask her how she knew. I didn’t sit beside her and say, “Teach me your ways”. I simply assumed she would always be there, as steady as the moon itself.

Now she is gone, but I find myself thinking of her more and more as I walk beneath the night sky. Especially when the moon is new. Especially when the world is quiet.

I like to imagine she is still teaching me, in her own way, through the passing of time, through the turning of the sky, and through the memory that lives on in my heart and in my bones.

I see now that her wisdom was never meant to be written down. It was meant to be lived.

And maybe, in some mysterious way, it still is.

~Buck

Photo Credit: My son, Ty Britt