I found the Moon card last Tuesday and I have to say, I think it’s being a little dramatic.
Everyone keeps telling me the Moon is about illusion, fear, the subconscious, “things that are not as they seem.” They say it with that voice people use when they want you to be scared of something but won’t just say it. I looked at the card. There’s a dog and a wolf howling at the moon, which, fair, that’s a mood. There are two towers. There’s a crayfish climbing out of a pool, which I think we can all agree is the real star of the show. And I thought, this is fine. This is a nice card about a nighttime walk.
I was told, by a woman at a shop who had very long earrings, that the Moon card is where your thoughts become clickbait for entities. She said it like a warning. I said, “Entities like what?” and she said, “Entities like what,” which is not an answer, and then she lit a candle that smelled like a basement.
But here’s the thing. I have no idea what is about to happen, and I am not afraid. I want to be clear about that. I’m not afraid because I don’t actually know what there is to be afraid of yet. That’s the whole trick, isn’t it? You can’t fear a thing you haven’t met. I haven’t met the entities. Maybe they’re nice. Maybe they’re just tired. Maybe they want to be included.
So I did what the card said, which is to walk. The Moon is a walking card, everyone agrees, though they say it like walking at night is somehow worse than walking in the day. I walked. And as I walked, my thoughts started doing this thing where they got very loud and very specific. Like: you left the stove on. Like: that person from six years ago still thinks about that thing you said. Like: what if the dog is a wolf and the wolf is a dog and you can’t tell and that means something about you specifically.
I thought, oh, I see. This is the clickbait. My own head is trying to sell me things. My own head is running ads. And I have, apparently, been clicking.
The woman with the earrings had said the entities feed on the clicks. I don’t know if that’s true. I don’t know what an entity eats normally. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that information except to say, okay, noted, and keep walking, because stopping on a dark path to argue with your own thoughts seems worse than just continuing toward whatever’s at the end.
Here’s what I’ve decided about the Moon, and I could be wrong, I’m often wrong, I once tried to read the Emperor as advice to take a nap: the Moon isn’t the enemy. The Moon is just the part of the night where you can’t see. That’s it. That’s the whole card. You can’t see. And when you can’t see, your brain fills in the blanks with whatever it has lying around, which for most of us is old fear and bad math and the memory of a text message we shouldn’t have sent.
So the entities aren’t out there. The entities are in here, in the blank spaces, wearing the costumes my thoughts make for them. The Moon card didn’t invite them. The Moon card just turned off the lights and let me hear how loud my own head gets when there’s nothing to look at.
I think that’s actually kind of beautiful. I think the crayfish agrees. The crayfish is climbing out of the water into the unknown, and nobody asks the crayfish if it’s scared. The crayfish just goes. That’s the whole lesson. Be the crayfish.
The woman with the earrings told me not to trust anything I see tonight. I told her I don’t even trust what I see in the daytime and she seemed to find that concerning, but I meant it kindly. I meant: I know I’m a person who misreads things. I know my thoughts are for sale. I know something is about to happen and I don’t know what it is and that is, technically, the definition of every single moment I have ever lived through, including the good ones.
So I’m not afraid. I’m curious. I’m walking. The path is dark and the dog and the wolf are both howling and honestly, they sound happy, or at least like they’re having a conversation, and I’ve decided to take that as a good sign.
If the entities want my attention, they can have it. I’ve got nothing else going on tonight. But I’m not going to click. I’m just going to keep walking toward the towers, and if something comes out of the pool, I’ll say hello, because it’s rude not to. The Moon didn’t teach me to be scared of the dark—it taught me that the dark is just the part of the walk I haven’t gotten to yet, and I’m going to get to it, and then past it, and then somewhere with better lighting, probably, eventually, God willing, who knows.