Lately, I haven’t been doing well. I have started getting overwhelmed by almost everything. I have lost the will to work for long hours. I have a lot of energy dips. I haven’t been able to live life as passionately as I used to.
And it gets to you - this downward spiral. Because your mind is not at ease. You want to do all these great things but your mind is so conscious that it doesn’t let you meet the subconscious. And until you don’t meet the subconscious, you can’t be creative or productive. I had built mechanisms, happy places, and pockets of stillness that enabled me to meet my muse, my subconscious, but lately, I haven’t been able to meet her. Which makes me more conscious, taking me farther down the spiral.
But earlier I had a trick for reaching to my muse. To feel happy. I would just think about the moon and let the calmness come over. From the real moon, I would only take some inspiration. And that inspiration would help me create my own moon, and give it my own touch, where I would change the laws of physics and everything else about it until it becomes my happy place.
Moon is my way of getting excited about life. A lot of arts that I like depict how people decided to make the moon their own moon. Be it the short stories of Italo Calvino, or the world we see in Ad Astra, or the poetry of Gulzar, it’s a very essential part of my life to see different versions of the moon for different artists.
Murakami wrote in Sputnik Sweetheart, “We're both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We're connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.”
One reason I am a selenophile is that it makes you focus on something which is bigger than you. Watching a movie or being in a concert is still a little ‘earthly’. But imagine being with someone you love, sitting on the rooftop, seeing the cosmic elements change that you have no control over, which are in some ways deciding your fate. Makoto Shinkai depicts this beautifully in his films. Same reason why I like films like Melancholia & Coherence. Be it the passing of a comet, or the collision of Earth with another planet, there are these few majestic things that change the course of your life.
When I think about the moon, I find hope. As my passions are changing, I sometimes need things to hold on to, to feel excited. Celestial objects do that for me.
I don’t want you to look at the moon. I want you to think about the moon and let the mind fill the canvas. Once you see this eventual mind image, it might not even look like a moon. But that shouldn’t worry you, because this is your moon, and you can make it look like however you want.
I love the paintings where you see a round object in the sky where there is vagueness about it being the sun or the moon. These are my favorite ones. Because they just did their job to make me feel excited having not to worry about the factual accuracies. They get you closer to your subconscious without judging you for thinking of the sun as the moon or the moon as the sun.
A friend recently called me during the night and exclaimed, "You need to stop whatever you are doing and go see the moon". I went out and looked up in the sky. And I realized this was the intervention I needed in my life to feel happy and excited again. We don't do things like these anymore. We need to call up our friends asking them to go out and look at the moon.