Greetings dear friends, for the first proper week in February. Welcome! All through February, the Inside posts will be coming from Moy Mell, a cottage I told you about HERE. There’s a lot of meaning in the name, describing as it does the Old Irish “Land of Honey” - located somewhere near to Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree with its “bee-loud glade.”
Here is today’s Inside Subscriber issue. It is a tale for you to listen to, or read along.
A Bedtime Story for You
Here in Moy Mell Cottage it is late at night beneath a sliver of bright moon. It is a reflective time of pause, of retreat, and repose. Why then am I telling this to you? To capture some essence of this moon crescent’s silver rays modified and shimmering pure without thought, to give to you a drink of moon-water in a silver cup, held with both hands. Cold. The taut water surface reflects a moon sliver, and the cup holds the moon in its depth.
My sip is crescent-shaped, my eyes close into crescents, my forehead—there's a tiny imperceptible silver crescent just between the eyebrows. That's because here at Moy Mell we are awake at night to this subtle magic, and it has a singing piercing tone—unmistakeably beautiful.
Drink the water if you wish health and intuition to grow within you. Sip the water and feel its silver mercurial weight. Look into the cup and it widens into a chalice and the whole world's mythologies are carved, engraved and embossed all around the outside, feeling solid to the hands, and cool. Glinting in the firelight the engraved figures almost move, almost engage with one another, and the twining vines encircling the rim show fruits that appear as diamonds when the firelight flickers.
Candles on the table give a warm light to the silver goblet as if it were becoming gold before my eyes. The inside: carven old and grey, silver but more like pewter or lead. The water clear reflects on the surface the moon’s sly smile. Drink this and hear the moon’s calling.
It will taste like ordinary water. We know full well that the moon is not contained in this cup, anymore than it can be found in all the pools and ponds, lakes and seas, or even as it shines reflected in the pupils of our eyes. Yet something of the moon slides down my throat, like a silvery crescent-formed fish. Like a moon shard.
It brings a wealth of dreams, a cornucopia of night imagining, and a fantastic festival of myth and meaning poetically cloaked as if at a costume ball in Venice, or a feast celebrating the birth of horses in the Roma travellers’ camp. Moon beings, citizens of Luna, leap over fires, twirl hoops of flame, wear hats without purpose except to give others the pleasure of surprise. The artist, like the trapeze girl in Chagall.
Drink the moon. Dream the moon’s delights. Tonight, become like me, a citizen of Luna. Dream in these moon waves like the owl and the pussycat.
The feast of the imagination is now being laid out on the long table, all fashioned in colours and forms artful, delightful, unusual, fanciful. As the music begins and the masked costume ball starts, look up at the moon, aware that for many nights this festival of the imagination will reel and riot until dawn ends the dreams and day takes her turn.
The white horse rides higher each night and the costumed acrobats assemble long silver ladders. For on the night when the moon is full, they will all go into her, be absorbed into her being. And some say they project their own dreams down to us after that, until they are drained of dreams and the new moon gives them the peace. They finally receive solemn quiet.
But tonight we are not there. We are here, and the table is set. The music! The lights, twinkling into our hearts. And our silk pointed shoes begin to dance us.
Thanks for listening, reading, and supporting my work.
I’ll have another message from Moy Mell ready for you next week. (And I’m working on improving the audio setup, for those of you who want to listen.) In the meantime, watch for the regular version of this newsletter to find its way to your inbox soon, too.
A Moy Mell Bedtime Story