L U N A T A L K with Eva Moon

Full Beaver Moon

November 12, 2008 on 9:57 am | In General Musing |

This isn’t what you’re thinking. Sorry.

This time of year is heavy with celebrations. They make the passage of time significant and connect one person’s experience to another’s. Easy-peasy for the religious. A little harder for atheists. What marks life’s transitions? What makes one day different from the next? Most importantly, where are the excuses for breaking out the champagne?

One could reasonably argue that there are no transitions and one day is not inherently different from the next. These are artificial constructs. But humans survived and thrive because we adhere in communities and traditions are a kind of glue.

So what is the atheist to do? One option is to celebrate traditional religious holidays but in a secular manner. This is largely what we do in our family. We wrote our own Haggadah for Passover, carefully excising all the religious bits and turning our seder into a sort of Amnesty International Day. Next month we’ll light the menorah by the Christmas tree (see Light the F*cking Candles). Not to celebrate a miracle or a messiah, but because it’s fun and we want our kids to have fond memories of their lives at home.

When my sons were in their early teens, I felt a strong need to mark a transition from boyhood to adulthood for them. For girls, there’s the obvious onset of menses. But what is there for boys? They needed a rite of passage too. I couldn’t see a way to take the religion out of bar mitzvah prep.

We settled on a men-only wilderness trip. For each boy’s fourteenth birthday, their father and uncles took him off for a five-day camping trip. I was not allowed to go, nor was I allowed to be involved in the prep or hear any details of what transpired. I suspect nothing more outrageous than fire, alcohol, massive consumption of red meat and unrestrained peeing but I’ll never know.

It worked. Each boy came home a little changed. There was a new, palpable solidarity with the men. A bit of swagger. My full moon influence had waned just a bit, but it felt right. I am grateful to my brothers-in-law, who took time out of their normal lives in California to fly up to Washington for it. And I really don’t want to know what they did. Really.

My oldest friend, Dreah, has taken a different route to creating non-religious celebration. She follows astronomical events. These are no less arbitrary than religious ones. There is nothing inherently significant about a solstice or equinox, but at least the events are not encumbered by heavy religious trappings (or at least not unavoidably). Even as teenagers, Dreah and I put on Midsummer’s Eve parties and invented our own rites. And today, decades later, I still get greetings from her on cross-quarter days and full moons.

Today is the Full Beaver Moon. I don’t usually feel compelled to celebrate the full moons, but this is one I can get behind.

Should I celebrate the waxing moon as well?

See more like that one:

• New Year's Dissolutions
• Neither snow nor...
• I was promised at least 6 inches
• Eight Crazy Latkes
• Fluffy Pillow of Falsehood