By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

LAST Thursday morning at 3:23 a.m., my niece Jam sent me a message, “Yung moon may rainbow”, accompanied by a photo. I went out to see it, but it was a bright moon with no rainbow.

At 10:16 p.m. on the same day, Jam sent another message telling me that I might be luckier this time to see a rainbow, and that a band of orange is already visible. I went to the terrace to take a video, and took a fairly good shot of the bright, rainbow-less moon, with a black hawk suddenly flying on the frame. I took another video, and this time, there was a blinking light below it, an airplane descending. It might be Ashang’s plane, my niece, as she was on a Cebu Pacific flight from Japan, landing before midnight.

The moon, especially the full moon, fascinates Jam, even as a young child. I remember her calling my attention to a rainbow with faint colors, almost undetectable by the naked eye, arched above the waters of the West Philippine Sea, back when we still called it, China Sea. The moon is like a magnet to two friends, Lily Flor Gallardo and Connie Lopez-Madarang, who have taken thousands of photos in its various phases, like me. The moon calls, we are drawn to its energies, like we are one with it.

The effect of the moon is not unique to artists and poets. History is replete with accounts associating the moon with the behavior of human beings. Despite many scientific studies proving otherwise, the belief that the full moon affects the minds of people persists to this day. My father for example, used to tell us, “Agkayo umpapaway ta umbabaleg may bulan, usilan to kayo nen Osin bulan-bulanen.” (Don’t go out now that the moon is full, madman Jose will run after you!). Bulan, the local term for the moon, is the root word of bulan-bulanen (mad, madness), like “Luna”, the Spanish term for moon, is the root word of “lunatic”.

An article entitled, “Bad Moon Rising: the persistent belief in lunar connections to madness” reaffirms the scientific findings that the correlation between madness and the phases of the moon is very nil, less than one percent. Written in 2005 by Alina Iosif, Senior Resident in Psychiatry and Bruce Ballon Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, of the University of Toronto, Canada, this article also traces the beginnings of the belief.

Science is not static. Maybe now it negates the relationship of the moon and the lives of human beings. In the future, we may yet find to our surprise that astrology and astronomy unite at various points, the way moonbeams weave magic in the minds of poets. On that day, I will celebrate oneness, in the manner described in an excerpt of the poem, Moon breath, composed 13 My 2022.

It is as if my essence flows
with you, through the moonbeams
as if, it has, for so many distant years
before my knowing, even before
I was conceived under a tree
by the moonlight

it is as if I know nothing else
except your presence, so familiar
and close, a breath indistinguishable
from my own, my own
beginning and end

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