mooning for adventure.

Like everyone else, I am a sucker for the big "one-off" astronomical events.

Super moons. Planet conjunctions. Meteor showers. Solar eclipses. News of similar events is similar to the percussive call of the sideshow barker that pulls us into the heavenly freak show.

Of course, none of those events are "one-off." Every astronomical event that slips on stage is cyclical -- well, with the obvious exception of dramatic climaxes that end up creating a huge crater in the Yucatan peninsula and provide material for another Gary Larson cartoon.

As enticing as the Big Events are, my favorite sky-watching pursuit is the phases of the moon. There is an obvious moral in the lesson of the moon whose ability to be seen is dependent on its flashier cousin the sun.

As the month passes, the moon chases the sun and draws closer and closer. But, instead of benefiting from its proximity to the sun, the closer it gets during the day, the less light reflects from the moon's surface until it almost disappears in the day sky.

It isn't until the moon is furthest in its orbit from the sun (as viewed from Earth) that it attains its full glory on its own. Light will reflect off of the full surface of the moon only when it rises just as its source of light is setting.

The sun-moon chase is part of our common history as humans. The Inuit know the tale as the incestuous Igaluk chasing his beautiful sister Malina. Or the competition between Helios and Selene in Greek mythology. The chase echoes deep in our souls. 

Scientists, of course, will explain all of this as nothing more than the orbit of the moon around Earth and Earth's orbit around the sun. Simply a Keplerian calculation.

The photograph at the top of this essay was taken in last week's full moon cycle. On the same day that the Perseverance probe landed on Mars.

That evening I had dinner with Joyce and Gary. She was thrilled by the video of the Mars landing, and with the very idea of humanity reaching out into space. That was not a surprise. She is one of the few people I know who tracks the possibility of seeing the space station orbit overhead. She even has a ticket to Mars.

I say "few people" because most people I know have become blasé about space exploration. My grandmother was born in 1892 in Northcote, Minnesota. Not only did she experience a move to Oregon in her twenties, she witnessed the introduction of automobiles, airplanes, home appliances, victory over European and Asian fascism and communism, electricity, phonographs -- and space travel. When she died in 1977, she left a world that she would have not recognized in 1892.

In 1961, Miss Dix wheeled a portable black-and-white television set from the West Concord AV room into our sixth grade classroom. My friends, Keith May, Neil Hodgin, Daurel Colony, and I watched rapt as Alan Shephard was shot into space, and, almost as miracuously, recovered from the ocean.

The next year, the same television, this time in Mr. Vaught's class, brought us John Glenn's flight. And so it went through high school.

Television was there reporting on our space adventures -- until that day in the summer of 1969 when my college friends and I stopped our beach reveries to watch Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins launch into space. Four days later, in a friend's basement, about a dozen of us gathered around another television to watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

That memory is why I am so fond of an episode of "The Crown." Episode seven of season three centers around Prince Philip's fascination with the 1969 moon landing and his own mid-life crisis.

Because princes having some privileges, he arranges a personal audience with the three astronauts. Up to that point, he had been struggling with his purpose in life, and, like many of us, thought he had found it in the technological wonder of the moon landing. He had "an almost jealous fascination with the achievements of these young astronauts."

Instead, as a result of his audience with the astronauts, he discovered they astronauts were just ordinary men -- not heroes with extraordinary qualities. (Tom Wolfe, of course, offers a completely different portrait in The Right Stuff.)

At a meeting of frustrated middle-aged Anglican priests, he summed up what he thought was really bothering him.

My mother died recently. She ... she saw that something was amiss.

It's a good word, that. A-Amiss.

She saw that something was missing in her youngest child. Her only son.

Faith.

"How's your faith?" she asked me.

I'm here to admit to you that ... I've lost it. And... without it, what is there?

The ... The loneliness and emptiness and anticlimax of going all that way to the moon to find nothing, but haunting desolation ... ghostly silence ... gloom.

That is what faithlessness is. As opposed to finding ... wonder, ecstasy, the miracle of ... divine creation, God's design and purpose.

What am I trying to say?

I'm trying to say that ... the solution to our problems, I think, is not in the ... in the ingenuity of the rocket, or the science or the technology or ... even the bravery.

No, the answer is in here.

Or here, or wherever it is that ... that faith resides. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald had a great sense of the human condition. "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

I suspect he was trying to say that humans inherently possess a first-rate intelligence because we are all capable of holding opposed ideas. We do it every day.

I have yet met a person who believes solely in the scientific method to describe everything in their lives. Any scientist who has been in love or read a novel or experienced a sunset knows that most of life's offerings lie outside the boundaries of science.

That is why it is possible to see space exploration not only as a great technological achievement, but also as the type of adventure that helps give meaning to our lives. Often to enhance our faith.

Knowing how a rocket works does not take away from the possibility that the wolf will eventually catch the rabbit in the sky.