I’m sitting at my desk. Tears are close to the surface.

I’m having trouble identifying keys that aren’t in the direct glow of the screen. I keep pressing ‘insert’ instead of ‘delete’ and my words start vanishing as I type, as if eaten by a hungry lexicon.

It’s growing dark outside, but I’m not yet ready to close the curtains on the world – or on the sky.

The moon, recently only a fingernail clipping, is beginning to look as if she might become a sphere again. For now, though, she’s a chubby part-sphere, like a rugby ball, or American football, dispensing silvery light upon the imminent night. Like my flat screen on my black keyboard. But with beauty.

Clouds move serenely – but not slowly – across her face. It’s that beautiful time of twilight when they are still just visible beneath a sky that – for a few minutes longer – is just the steely side of blue. A mackerel sky, but only where the moon illuminates the vapours sailing in from the freshening sea. Otherwise, they disappear in the darkness of the deepening blue.

The tears are not for me.

I’m sitting here, feeling that moon, seeing that sky, knowing that out there, around the other side of our own full, chubby globe, are people desperate for food. People dying, people suffering. Cold, desperate, sick, hungry people who once had a home and now have nothing. Nothing except what other people can do for them – charity.

People doing things for people, just because.

Today someone in the Philippines took the trouble to reply to an email I had sent. I was worried about her in the aftermath of the terrible typhoon.

She also took the time to read and comment on my post about the death of a friend – so many years ago – and to sympathise.

That’s what brings tears to my eyes, as I look on this pale, bright moon.

You see, when Anthro-man’s away in far-flung places – as he sometimes is, without me – for weeks or months at a time, it’s usually the season when the moon is coy about her presence. When she’s fragile against the light sky of a long day, or lingering on in the early morning blue. But when I look up at her, or her friends, the stars, I know that she can transport my thoughts across the hemispheres. Across the time zones, across the world. Because Anthro-man can see her too. Our eyes have swept her surface in anxiety, in happiness, in anticipation, sadness, longing. And she has seen us both as she persists in her calm illumination of our nights and of our minds.

So, tonight,  I think of San, in the Philippines.

She, too, can look upon the moon.

San’s blog

http://35andupcynicismonhold.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/foraging-in-the-wreckage/

Donations

There are many charities working to mitigate this disaster, in the UK follow this link, http://www.dec.org.uk

or donate via the charity of your choice such as the Red Cross, Oxfam, Save the Children or Cafod.