The moon is full today. I woke early to its light spilling in through La Tortue’s side window. Dellie was happy to rush down to the beach with me to watch the moon set in the west, just as the sun rose in the east. 
These moments of alignment — when sun-and-moon, yin-and-yang, and light-and-dark hang in perfect balance — are some of the most precious I have experienced in this journey through the West. Here on Harris Beach in southernmost Oregon just after 7 a.m., others were pulling their cars into the day-use parking area to watch the show. As the ocean roared with rhythmic certainty, the setting moon encountered a bank of clouds near the horizon and disappeared from view. Cars pulled away. Dellie and I lingered to walk the beach. As we padded across the smooth, hard sand, the tide swept closer. A local had told me the day before that this 24-hour cycle is the highest high and the lowest low of the year.
Suddenly, in the northwestern sky, the moon returned, hanging its lower half below the bank of clouds. I watched in awe as the whole sphere emerged fully newborn to the sky, casting a glow across the churning waves. In a matter of moments, the show was over. It was on its way down behind the clouds again.
Some indigenous tribes call the January moon the “Wolf Moon.” I turned to find Dellie up ahead, on a rock cliff above the beach, watching the new day dawn. I am ever-grateful for my canine friend. She is a coyote-cross, not a wolf, but nonetheless a pure spirit who trusts her instincts and follows the Light relentlessly in her own travels through this world.
