Geese Wintering on the Moon

While reading a delightful chapter in Annie Dillard's book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I came across an interesting and lyrical description: 

"Today a gibbous moon marked the eastern sky like a smudge of chalk. The shadows of its features had the same blue tone and light value as the sky itself, so it look transparent in its depths or softly frayed, like the heel of a sock. Not too long ago, according to Edwin Way Teal, the people of Europe believed that geese and swans wintered there, on the moon's pale seas."( Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. Print. Pg. 40.)

In our linear and modern mind, we may dismiss such imagery as foolish irrationality: Geese and swans wintering on the moon indeed! We know the moon is a cold and lifeless orb, far away in space!

Look differently and see with childlike eyes. It is in imagery and imaginative wordplay where we can break from our didactic ways of thinking and begin to examine life in a deeper and more poetic form. This figurative allusion - geese and swans wintering on the moon's pale seas - is not a fanciful exercise in escapism or the witty turn of a phrase, but rather the critically necessary kick-start return to the places we loved as children, where fireflies and faeries (real or imagined) skittered across the evening sky.


The next time you see a 'gibbous' moon melding into the sky, notice the pale seas and imagine the geese and swans lazily resting on the pale seas. You may then be surprised to find what else you can see.