The Night the Moon Turns Its Face Away

 

Cedar Valley News
July 17, 202
The Night the Moon Turns Its Face Away
By Dan Larson

There is a man in this valley who carried another family for most of a year, and I only know because I am the one people tell.

I will not say who. He would be unhappy with even this much. A family in my stake went through a long trouble with no quick bottom to it, and for the better part of a year the groceries appeared, the driveway got plowed, and the older boy somehow always had a ride to his games. The family did not know who. They assumed it was several people. It was one man, and he took some care to make it look like several, because he did not want to be thanked. He wanted them carried. The two are not the same, and he knew the difference.

I have been thinking about him this week because of what the sky is about to do.

On the twelfth of August, the finest meteor shower of the year peaks, and this year it comes at its best. The Perseids, they are called, and they have fallen every August for longer than we have kept records. People wrote them down two thousand years ago. In the old Christian calendar they fell near the feast of a martyr named Lawrence, and people called them his tears.

Most years the moon is up and washes the fainter ones out. Not this year. This year the sky will be as dark as it gets, and the reason is the thing I cannot stop turning over.

The sky is dark because the moon has stepped out of the way.

On the same day, the new moon slides exactly between the Earth and the Sun and throws a total eclipse across Greenland, Iceland, and Spain. We will not see the eclipse from here; the shadow falls far from us. But the meteors we will see, because the same moon now darkening the sun by day has taken itself out of the night sky, and left the dark clean for the falling stars.

Sit with it a moment. The moon does the most dramatic thing it ever does, covers the sun in the middle of the day, and it does so by making itself invisible. New moon. The face turned away. At the very hour of its largest work, you cannot find it in the sky.

I am a plain man, so I will draw the line even though you see it already.

The most important work most of us ever do, we do the way the moon does it, and the way the man in my valley did it. Out of the light. Face turned away. Nobody keeping score, nobody saying our name, the good thing happening and the source of it nowhere to be found.

We have it backward, mostly. We are taught to want the credit, to get our name on the thing, to be seen doing the good so the good counts. And there is an old and stubborn teaching set exactly against this. When you give, do not let your own left hand know what your right hand is doing. When I was young, it sounded like a hard saying. It does not anymore. I think it describes the happiest people I know. They have been let out of the exhausting work of being seen.

The moon is not diminished by turning its face away. It is doing the most it will do all year.

Here is what I ask of you, and it costs only a late hour and a dark patch of yard.

On a clear night in the middle of August, go outside well after dark, away from the porch light. Lie back. Give your eyes twenty minutes. And watch the old faithful stars fall, in a sky made dark by a moon you cannot see, doing its great and hidden work exactly where no one is looking.

And while you are out there, think of who has been the dark for you. Who cleared the sky so you could see, and never signed a name to it.

Then, if you can, go and be it for somebody. And do not get caught.

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Cedar Valley News has a Facebook group. If you have comments and want to join the conversation, you are welcome. Who has been the dark, the one who let you see something? Come and tell us. And if we get something wrong, tell us, and we will run the correction. https://bit.ly/40p8jKy

This editorial is part of the fictional Cedar Valley News series, written by Evan Swensen, Publisher, and Claude Marshall, AI Developmental Editor. While the people and town of Cedar Valley are fictional, the astronomy is real: the Perseid meteor shower peaks on the night of August 12 into the 13th, 2026, under a new moon, and this same new moon produces a total solar eclipse across Greenland, Iceland, and Spain, visible from the contiguous northern United States and Alaska only as a partial eclipse. The Perseids have been recorded since antiquity and were once called the Tears of Saint Lawrence. Sources: NASA, the National Solar Observatory, the American Meteor Society, and the Old Farmer’s Almanac. The scriptural allusion is to Matthew 6:3.