Wolf Moon

Dear friend,

A huge, full rose-gold moon hangs low on the horizon. The Alps are sleeping giants, their faces silhouetted dusky plum against an amber sky.

“You’ll want to pull back a little and give that car more space,” I say to Chiara as we drive home from the mountains. “Now take a glance to your left.”

A sparrow of joy takes flight.

“Oh,” she says.

The landscape has turned ugly. The lights of Turin’s industrial zone glow in the distance — out-of-town shopping complexes, car parks bursting at the seams, streetlights reflected on curved metal roofs. It feels like something went wrong.

“I wish I could see it from somewhere not so ugly,” she adds.

It’s easy to think clearly in the mountains. The snow is deep and the woods are silent. I’d worried about getting snow in my boots and cold feet, but it’s five below freezing and easy to brush off. A frozen spring looks like the teeth of a giant. The river makes cloud patterns under the ice.

To die well you must live well, says the still, quiet voice inside me.

I know what it means.

My father’s last years were dominated by fear. A rock and a hard place. Nothing to live for but the past and his love for Mam, and alongside it a crippling fear of the unknown. His world shrank until he ran out of breath. It’s been five years since I held his hand and tried to reason with him.

“Let go, Dad. It’s alright. You’ll be alright.”

Mam never got to travel. She loved maps. She’d manufacture excuses to get the finger-stained atlas out of the drawer — anytime anyone had been somewhere she wanted to see it in blue and brown and green. But she delighted in small things: a blackbird, the comings and goings of the neighbours, the sky.

Dad too, in his own way.

January 3rd was the full moon. A friend called it the Wolf Moon. It’s also the birth date of Paramahansa Yogananda. He’s my teacher. The coincidence makes me shiver and I remember a tradition I was told about — to set a question at the full moon and return to it at the next. Not to force an answer, but to listen over time.

So I asked:

What am I to do?

How am I to serve?

What is the joy I’m meant to share?

And I remembered something from childhood.

I’m young, sitting at a classroom table. The teacher is kind. I’m stamping black-ink clock faces into my squared maths book. Twelve hours. Round numbers. I feel a strange unease, like I’m being lured into something. Not tricked exactly — but traded.

Why are we not learning the phases of the moon?

Why not the stars?

Twelve hours on the clock.

Twelve months in the year.

Twelve disciples.

I can’t put it into words. I just know I’m gaining something and losing something at the same time.

Back in the present, we drive alongside the wall of an old Italian king’s hunting park — miles and miles of stone. Kings, queens, success, being ahead of others — these stories get into us young. They lodge deep in the architecture of the mind. That programming can flick the fuse if you get too close to it.

But it’s still in our power to tell different stories.

Some things grow when you give them away.

At home, the coffee tastes good. There’s pan dolce for breakfast — rich, buttery, studded with fruit and candied peel. Panettone too. Golden bread. Biscuits. Ordinary abundance.

On the television, a nature programme shows desert bees. Two are making love. One has lime-green eyes, the other pillar-box red. Chiara tells me, smiling, that the male mates once and then dies.

It doesn’t seem like such a bad design to me.

Now it’s our last morning at her parents’ place. The cat sits with us at the breakfast table, turns side-on, narrows his eyes, and looks away toward the fields beyond the heavy cotton curtains.

It’s not easy to be here.

Ram Dass joked that if you suspect you’re enlightened, you should have it checked by a bona fide Zen master — and if you can’t do that, spend three weeks with your parents. Bettie and Angelo are the closest thing I have.

I didn’t look after my parents so well in their frailty. I didn’t want to see — so I didn’t — until it was too late to do anything, if I could have done anything, to soften the load on them.

Now I don’t want to leave, even as I long to be home in London, with the people and interests and work that call me. Helping here feels like a second chance, and I don’t quite know what to make of it.

Till next Sunday

Love

Mikey