Moon Noon or Happy Birthday Everybody

Yesterday before dinner as the sun set over Durham I stood on our roof patio and looked directly up. It was moon noon. A perfect half moon exactly overhead.

Beloved Yashna and Ang were over for dinner, which Sangodare noted was getting cold as I gazed at the moon. Sangodare noted this without saying any words at all. I love Sangodare’s articulate body language as much as I love the moon. There it is. My cosmic polyamory.

Ang’s aunt says that this particular half moon, the one between the lunar new year and the ancestral lantern festival at the first full moon, is everybody’s birthday. I don’t know why that makes sense, but I love it. If you know me, you know that I love everyone’s birthday. I will never get over the fact that each of us was born. Perfect halves all looking for each other. Or perfect wholes half in mystery ready to be reborn.

What a blessing to celebrate everybody’s birthday with vegan gluten free soy free puerto rican food and game night with our dear beloveds. But of course, when I thought about the everybody of everybody’s birthday, I thought about our recent ancestors who had every reason to believe that they would live the two weeks from the lunar new year to the lantern ceremony, to see the moon grow full again, eat mochi and send light that they now have to wait to receive.

Or maybe. And I pray this for the sake of all our sudden ancestors, ancestry is not a practice of waiting and there is no difference between sending and receiving light, and all the bullets on earth are wasted because we are all in the middle of being reborn. I don’t know. I’ll ask the moon.

I haven’t been in a state of mind where I needed the terror of other people’s screams, the spiritual plunder of bullets to distract me from my own rebirth. I use the other distractions capitalism pushes my way constantly. I mostly use work. But let me tell you right now, I will be so happy if one day you cancel a meeting with me because you just noticed you are being reborn. I will be so happy to remember that the part of you I can know remembers its connection with the part I will never know. Where for all I know you could be dancing and eating sweets with all our ancestors.

If it is everyone’s birthday in the reflected light of a half a moon, then my own resistance to rebirth, my complicity with capitalism’s desire to reproduce me as a consumer and something for you to consume is ruining the party. My gift to you right now? Go ahead and expect that I won’t be the same person I was.

In neoliberalism as usual I sacrifice strangers to my dependence on unnaccountable consumption. But all I want to do is celebrate everybody’s birthday. Not the day of it, just the fact of it. How can I live in a way that honors the fact that you were born, and you deserve free air and peace and celebration and safety today and every day?

I don’t know. That part is still in shadow. But that life where I get to love you all the way, without even knowing who you are, it does exist. Because you exist. Half lit by a setting sun. Committed to a world you can’t see from here. Giving and receiving all this light. Half of so many worthy wishes. Half open to so many unimaginable possibilities. Happy Birthday love. This is me. Gazing at you like the wisest fool. Until the food grows cold and the night makes your face even brighter.

P.S. The God of Every Day is my way of celebrating everyone’s birthday! Join me there.