Suburban Moon

The moon in a suburban sky. A gigantic sphere of rock, shining with the reflected light of a star, hangs over a commonplace scene of semis and front gardens you could find in any town in England.

Seeing the moon up there has often served me as a reminder that the ordinary and the everyday are not the whole story, and that we are surrounded everywhere and all the time by the strange and wonderful. (In fact I used the moon in just such a way in a story called ‘Spring Tide‘).

The strangest part, though, is that the suburban street is actually much rarer and more remarkable than the moon. There are many cratered spheres of rock in the solar system alone -look at Ceres for instance – but, as far as we know, no dwellings of any kind anywhere in the universe other than Earth, let alone something resembling a suburban semi.

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Recently my wife and I were returning from an outing with two of our grandchildren in the back of the car, one aged 3, one nearly 2. We pulled up outside a supermarket with the idea that my wife would nip in to buy a couple of things we needed while I waited in the the car with the children. But the children wouldn’t have that. They were determined to go in too.

Why? my grownup self thinks with a sigh. You’ve been in supermarkets many times before. What exactly is so interesting about this one? But they rush through the door, take in the scene for a second or two with expressions that say ‘WOW! CHECK THIS OUT!’, and are off down the aisles, finding things, looking at things, competely delighted and engrossed.

I suppose it’s necessary, from an evolutionary point of view, that everyday things should stop seeming amazing, because otherwise we’d constantly be distracted from necessary tasks, and that’s why what once seemed wonderful soon becomes merely ordinary. But the mysterious, the numinous, are not really other, not really remote unreachable places like the moon, but anything at all that we manage to see, by whatever means, without the dulling effect that comes with familiarity.

This, I suppose, is what my character Jeff in Dark Eden is reminding himself when from time to time he says, ‘We are here. We really are here.’

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