I used to have a pretty good moonmind.

I think most kids do. They’re often given latitude by parents who mistake them for childish imagination. Parents can be more silly than kids sometimes.

My grandmother was an excellent teacher. “Absurd” and “preposterous” were not in her vocabulary. She’d point out past the hill beyond the road and show me where I’d find the land of Ivan and Vasilisa. Just over the trees there, she’d point.

I kept my moonmind through adolescence. Laughter was its language, and I spoke it all the time. But then I crossed the threshold of adulthood and thought maybe it was about time I learned the words of work. It’s the thing to do, after all, right? We all at some point have to step out and find our place among the village.

But modern villages don’t want moonminds—they demand solar clarity. Facts, figures, filed paperwork. Subrogation. Strix varia versus T.a. affinis. Premises liability and token ring networking. Hydrogeomorphological biofiltration. You’ve got to adopt the language, wear the garb, adhere to the customs. And so I did.

I became the first person in a century-old program to be asked to leave.

The villagers knew I was faking it. I didn’t notice at the time but I was traversing adulthood with forged credentials.

So, I withdrew. I entered the Moonrealm and didn’t leave for about a year. I woke up after 8pm and retreated into dreams by sunrise. My roommate and I became ghosts to one another, and there were whole weeks in which I forgot the sky had once held colors.

It wasn’t like the movies. The night domain is not all magic and delight. I don’t know if Savage got fired for the cocaine or for sleeping in the storage closet, but it trickled down to a job for me. I lived out of a shoebox and memorized traffic lights and elevator sequences. Given directions from guys pounding their faces open in quiet intersections. I wasn’t there for Jeff’s “stabbing” accusation because for me there was the fire, but I remember stopping at a red light on Main, clinking drinks with a driver pounding Coors at 2 AM. Mine was coffee but that don’t matter none, he said, ‘fore you slam a cup, you hold it up. Luna’s land bestows a different kind of wonder.

After awhile, I rejoined Sun country. I kept the peace with the village, but my moonmind would still return on occasion. I started moonlighting at a bike shop when my day job navigated a corporate buyout. I sold my stuff and moved to Australia.

For the past few years, though, I’ve been spending way too much time in the sun. Toiling in the mid-day heat with lockdown, job-hopping, doomscrolling, confronting failed friendships and extended family challenges, always with the Light of Reason as a guide. Sunlight is The Disinfectant, after all, let’s work this out. We’re all wiser in the daytime.

This invites a hidden danger.

Eastern Europeans know of a woman who’s sometimes a hag, sometimes a maiden, sometimes an adolescent child who can only be seen when the day is at its brightest. Flowers in one hand, scythe in the other, the encounter can go one of two ways: if she catches you working, strange questions are likely to follow. Answer poorly and it’s the scythe or madness—either way you’ll lose your head. If she finds you out wandering or picking flowers like herself, though, she may just ask you to dance. Don’t even bother keeping up—no one dances like the Midday Maiden—but if you make it until sundown, you’ll be given riches that extend beyond imagination.

During these solar years, the world became a lot less funny to me. Days were hassles, not explorations. Many places I used to associate with community, presence and spiritual growth started to seem more like to-do lists. And yes indeed, I’ve had some very strange questions put to me in the full glower of daytime:

How do you open covered eyes and turn plugged ears?
What gets a tired moonhorse galloping again?
Who do you visit in the village around the village?

Have similar questions been put to you lately? Maybe you’ve been feeling like half yourself. Or maybe you’re just waiting to figure out what in the world I’m on about. Either way, the below are as far as I’ve been able to get with my responses. Maybe they’ll help you, too.

How do you open closed eyes and turn plugged ears?

We love fixes. Filing taxes? There’s an app for that. Need a lawyer? Get one with this phone number. Indigestion? Plop plop, fizz fizz.

All well and good, but as my grandmother said to me, if your feet are cold, sometimes it’s best to put on a hat. Certain problems have solutions you have to walk around, not toward.

Iain McGilchrist suggests that the best way to jump-start your right hemisphere is to first stop trying. It’s not something you do; it isn’t a procedure. You need to get still and grow quiet. Boredom helps. So does confusion tolerance. The trick is to stop doing for awhile. Drop your thoughts and experience the present again.

You open covered eyes and turn plugged ears by putting your hands inside your pockets.

What gets a tired moonhorse galloping again?

Sure, they need food, water, and a good brush-down just like any other, but when your moonhorse tires, you can’t hassle or prod them. It won’t do either of you any good.

After you’ve given yourself some time, I think the better way to do this is to follow Ted Gioia’s advice and seek limited experiences. Listen to new music, but not on your phone and not online—go to open mics, concerts and record stores instead. Go to a friend’s house and listen to whatever tapes and CDs are still in their attic. If movies are more your thing, stop streaming and maybe find your old DVD player. (Even better would be VHS.) Go through the minor ritual of blowing on the thing to encourage the gremlins in charge of optical sensors to cooperate. Look at art in museums and books, not on a screen.

If you’re of a religious persuasion, maybe mix it up a bit and attend a smaller gathering somewhere outside of where you typically congregate. Have you tried the outdoors? While there, try to communicate with new language that has a bit of moonlight wonder about it. This might take the form of attending mummer’s plays, listening to or reciting poetry, or just plain telling familiar stories in your own words.

What gets a tired moonhorse galloping again is cultivating a field it would want to gallop through.

Who do you visit in the village around the village?

Everybody needs community. And it’s part of the paradox of our time that we’ve never been more connected and alone. But I would argue that there are two communities we need to attend to.

The first is your village: your family, friends and neighbors. Check in on them. See them in person and for cryin’ out loud, when you do, put the phone down. Commit to a mutual presence.

The second is the village around the village—your lunar community if you like. The network that bolsters your intuition, your curiosity and your dreams. Dr. Martin Shaw would suggest that depending on who you are, this might be your favorite Escher drawings, or the megalodon teeth you’ve collected by the shore. Stevie Ray Vaughan albums, your bootlegger great-uncle that your grandfather tells you about, or the summer storms that light up your porch. It’s a healthy thing to consider these as not just nice things but relationships to maintain.

You visit the community you forgot you had in the village around the village: ancestors, nature, stories, locality, traditions.

Respite from reductionism

These days, you’ll hear as many theories about the cause of the world’s ills as you can find social media profiles. People don’t listen to facts anymore. People don’t go to church anymore. People don’t read books anymore. Behind it all is an insistence on rationalism—pointing, defining, setting parameters and diagnosis.

I’m not advocating we get rid of any of that—it’s led to the very technology that allows me to share this with you. But I am saying that’s not all that there is.

The teacup beside my keyboard as I type this is a ceramic vessel with a capacity of approximately one hundred and thirty milliliters. It’s also something my great-grandmother picked up in Japan during a trip I know nothing about, and the full story of how it came into my possession will remain a riddle. The former bit of information is helpful for knowing how much tea to brew along with the cups. But once that’s done, it needs to be set aside. It’s time then to put the phone away, stop looking at the clock and consider interconnection and the mystery of chance. Moonminds are terrible things to waste.