The Stars Around the Moon

Wake-up feel: 7.

A tossing night. Up and out of the bed before light.

Outside, still dark — only the half moon lighting the land, standing almost directly above me. As high as it would stand. Stars in a ring around it — glorifying it, or protecting it, I could not say.

Exercises, then the winding path up the mountain, climbing with it. To the right the slope falls away steep — the stream below, heard, not seen, running the other way. To the left the mountain keeps rising. Bees loud along the way — more active, it sounded, than in the last days. The mornings are getting colder.

A bird crossed my path, then another. It seems now they are making themselves known to me. I am not a stranger to them anymore.

On the way up, last night's dream came back — one dream or two, I am no longer sure. I sat with three who hold power over the made world of this age, and put one question to them: whether what they have built has reached its height — whether from here it stands still, or falls. The first said yes. The second said no. The third was there and not there, and said nothing. Then all three sprang up and carried the question elsewhere, and came back to talk on. A young woman at my side the whole time, whom I never introduced. The dream faded there.

Today the root again — so counted by those who set the moon against seed and soil through lifetimes, and by the herding people of these mountains before them. On such days, the old ones say, the strength of things draws downward — into soil, into cellar, into bone. The bees at the last nectar follow the same pull. Seed set into the earth under a falling moon, the sowers of these slopes held, takes hold at the root. And the moon I stood under before light has finished its climb — half its light given back, from this day it walks down the sky.

I walked back down.

Day 76
Verkhovyna, Carpathian Mountains, Ukraine
© 2026 Michel Garand | A Pilgrim's Journey | CC BY-SA 4.0
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