Being this is the first full moon I experienced living out in the country away from light pollution, I just realized it’s really bright. So bright, that it casts shadows. It’s almost like night and day from when the moon is not full, going from pitch black outside to illuminating about the same as a giant street light.

I was just reading Permaculture: A Designers’ Manual where Bill Mollison talks about the Anasazi people actually using the moon’s shadow to keep track of time. Employing nothing more than a spiral carving with perpendicular slabs of rock, they were able to predict the cyclical periods of flooding and drought, in style.

While Europe was in the “Dark Ages” suffering from plagues and famine, the Anasazi were busy flourishing from their intimate knowledge of their environment. There is evidence they even recorded supernovas and other deep space astrological events:

Hot desert summers and cold high altitude winters make the Chaco Canyon climate unforgiving. Crops planted at the wrong time would yield a poor harvest causing many tribe members to starve. The earliest systematic astronomical observations were likely motivated by this need for a calendar… so the Anasazi, and other ancient societies knew the night sky very well.

Mollison uses this example to make an interesting point: while native people are often posited as illiterate and unable to record complex phenomenon, they actually do so quite lucidly and often more democratically, albeit in a different manner. What might have taken us a bunch of highly paid experts to accomplish and interpret for “the masses,” took the Anasazi nothing more than utilizing their surroundings and was readable by everyone.

Many people would probably look at the Anasazi petroglyphs and say, “Ah that’s a pretty piece of art, maybe I can Ebay it” (and they do). Yet to the Anasazi it wasn’t just something abstract but had a purpose and embodied useful knowledge. Unfortunately for us (and the victims of our civilization), these two things have become separated. There is art and there is engineering/architecture, one is for entertainment and the other is for function/getting things done. This dualist thinking permeates our culture and has had devastating effects. We even go as far as to consider ourselves separate from nature, that which does the most basic things as sustain us and give us life.

Thankfully, many like Mollison and others have already started compiling useful knowledge to help us make the transition to a holistic way of life with inclusive solutions where there is a connection between me and you, nature and people, reality and imagination. So, who knows what the moon will illuminate. I’m going to go outside and see.