“Escape from the black cloud that surrounds you. Then you will see your own light as radiant as the full moon.”
Rumi
When Charlotte Brontë’s “Shirley” was published in 1849, such was the luminous appeal of that heroine that Shirley, previously a masculine surname, became a popular girl’s name. Based on her sister Emily, who was whisked from life by tuberculosis during the writing of the novel, Shirley is the embodiment of freedom. Not just the freedom that comes from wealth and courage, although they play their part in the novel, but the freedom that comes from a self-sufficient joy. “…the twilight sky showing its “sweet regent” [the moon], new throned and glorious, suffice to make earth an Eden, life a poem, for Shirley. A still, deep, inborn delight glows in her young veins, unmingled-untroubled, not to be reached or ravished by human agency because by no human agency bestowed…she does not know her dreams are rare…she does not know…the full value of that spring whose bright fresh bubbling in her heart keeps it green.”
“Yoga is the commitment to become established in the state of freedom.”
The Yoga sutras of Patanjali” (trans. Alastair Shearer)
The moon is a stealthy driver of the plot; determining when clouds will be chased away, when there will be light enough for neighbours to be visited or homes returned to, and when luddite crowds bent on destruction of work-stealing machinery can be spotted by authorities. The true depths of the protagonists are revealed by their different emotions reflecting on “the free dower of Nature”, as often as not in the light of the moon.
Before artificial light, that stronger connection with the moon was common across time and cultures. A branch of Yoga, Swara Yoga, aims to balance lunar and solar qualities within mind and body, with lunar energies being serene, restorative, and solar energies vitalising, fiery and active. The similarities between the descriptions and practices of these sun and moon qualities to the parasympathetic, rest and restore, and sympathetic, active nervous system are striking.
I invite you to celebrate the moon with me!