Stopped in My Tracks by the Moon

Tonight is a perfectly calm, crisp and cloudless night in Kerry. I finished up in the pub, did all my bobs and jobs before driving home as normal. The roads were empty, and the temperature gauge on my car showed a brisk two degrees. The way I come takes me over a low hill, from the top of which you can see right across the valley to the hills in the distance. Tonight when I rounded that last bend, something spectacular was waiting for me.

A huge crescent moon hung just above the floor of the valley, in a night sky so dark, it may as well be painted black. It looked as if the moon was hanging directly over a tiny town in the distance, shining down on it in utter brilliance. The whole scene was serene and otherworldly. I know this is a trick of the atmosphere, bringing the moon so close you think you could touch it, but I really did feel that way. Right there at that moment, the universe held up a tiny part of its beauty to be compared alongside the work of man, and our efforts looked puny in comparison.

I pulled the car over and got out. It was amazing! Then I did the same idiot thing everyone seems to do these days, I took out my phone and tried to take a photo of it. After a few shaky looking snaps of a bright dot in the sky, I realised I was an idiot and put the phone away. I stood there for a good ten minutes, undisturbed by even one other car and watched this huge astral artwork move slowly skyward.

When I eventually got back in my car, I knew I had seen something very special, and the only sad part was, I had nobody there with me to share the experience. I may have been the only person in this part of the world, who saw that moon, from that angle, at that moment, and that knowledge made me sad. I wanted to wake everyone I knew up and let them see what I had seen, I wanted to be able to share that moment with someone special, it may well have acted as a wedding ring for the soul, but that wasn't meant to be.

So what better way to celebrate the gift's of the heavens than with music.

Here are the crappy phone shots just to prove how silly amazing things look when we view the world through a phone.

(This one was taken lower down the valley closer to the village.)