Can You Name the Moon Today?

Header from Pixabay, Public Domain.

Today I can name the moon. Once I could not name it.

When I can name the moon, I know that I've been living a healthy lifestyle. I know that I've paid attention to the Mother Earth, or Pachamama, my family, and myself. When I'm unsure which moon shines through my bedroom window at night, or how the sun lights her face on a particular evening, I know that I've missed out on something and need to pay attention.

Most of us have lost track of the lunar calendar. Even more of us have lost track of the lessons she teaches.

Can you name the moon today?

Our Gregorian Calendar

A predecessor to Rome's Gregorian Calendar
Image Source: Kleuske
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5)]
on Wikimedia Commons

Today's most widely used calendar, the Gregorian calendar, came to us from the ancient Romans. By the time the Old World invaded and took over the New World, our calendar, with its blocky months of rectangular weeks and square days had set the new rhythm that the European conquerors imposed on the rest of the world.

The name of the month of August, from the Gregorian calendar comes from the Latin word "Augustus," meaning "consecrated" (sacred) or "venerable" (worty of respect). It seems that the Roman Senate of 8 B.C. decreed the month's name in honor of Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, thereby changing the name of their month "Sextilis" to "Augustus" (Merriam Webster 2015).

My own family, kindergarten, grade school, high school, and college all encouraged me and my generation to abandon nature's rhythm in favor of the blocky civil calendars of academic and fiscal years. The calendar, though, always seemed unnatural to me; it lacked something that tied it to the life, the earth, and the universe.

Back to a Natural Calendar

I had known from my childhood, perhaps from the days of "Indian Guides," television, or books that my parents had given me, that the Lakota called the month of August, "the moon of ripening," or "wipazatkan." As a young man, I had read bits and pieces of John G. Neihardt's (1932) interpretation of Black Elk's words, in Black Elk Speaks, and I knew that the Indian medicine man refered to August as the "Moon When the Cherries Turn Black," "Moon When the Cherries are Ripe," and "Moon of Black Cherries" (Walker 1998). Other names, used by the Native Americans, for the moon of August include the Poncas', "the corn is in the silk moon," the Comanches' "summer moon" (urui mua), and the Hopis' "joyous moon" (paamuya) (Skywise Unlimited, date unknown).

Ancient Mesoamerican and South American cultures,
like most ancient cultures, utilized calendars with natural
cycles, like the solar and lunar orbits.
Image Source: El Comandante, on Wikimedia
(https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7631738)

After the XXth Century education system had trained me to ignore and forget the moons of the Indians that sparked my boyhood imagination, a mournful event brought me back to the moons of the pre-Columbian Americans. Some time during the year of the Hatian and Chilean earthquakes (2010), under the waning moon of the spring winds (March), I had moved away from my daughters' home and slept for many moons in my office, at the institute, where I worked. Isolated from my daughters and in need of social support I found myself accompanied each night only by the moon and the whisper of the wind.

Not long after the move, I received an invitation to attend a Mexican sweat lodge ceremony: a temazcal. I do not know when I first crawled in a clockwise circle, on the dirt floor of the Temazcal del Circulo de los Osos (The Mexican Sweat Lodge of the Bears). However, I know that there I found others who remembered the natural calendar of our childhood dreams.

The Native American Lunar Calendar

The Native Americans, unlike the continent's European invaders, used a logical, natural system for keeping track of the passage of time. The American Indians named the lunar months, or moons.

Not surprisingly, the different language groups, tribes, and local populations had distinct names for

Native Americans, reportedly found an
interesting relationship between the
number of scales on a turtles back and
the 13-moon calendar year (Cline 2003).

each moon, or lunar month, based upon the natural seasonal events pertinent to their region and culture. The "moon of ripening," like Black Elk's "moon when the cherries turn black," fits well for those who live in temperate fruit producing, or agricultural, regions, for example. Meanwhile, the tribes of the Great Lakes and Lake Champlain, knowing that the sturgeon run in August, called it the "full sturgeon moon" (The Old Farmer's Almanac, date unknown).

I live in the desert, and my moon's different from the moon of the temperate forest above our village. This month the grasses and composites reach their peak growth ... their seeds fattening and maturing. The cottonwood leaves, as we enter the last quarter of the waning ripening moon, have already begun to yellow. A few afternoons ago I saw some of my sisters picking plums along the highway, and today I tasted the sweet pulp of the mesquite legume on the campus where I work. For me, this moon is the "moon when the mesquite sweetens" or the "moon of the thick grass."

That is what I mean when I can name the moon. I have paid attention during the last few years. I have spent time with Pachamama, and her children. I have learned, and I am watching, listening, smelling, feeling, and tasting. I have been living and not just working. I have hiked, and I have toiled and rested in my garden. Today I can name the moon. Once I could not name it. 

Can you name the moon today?

References Cited

Cline, D. A. 2003. Thirteen Moons on a Turtle's Back. On the website of The Pilgrims & Plymouth Colony:1620 (http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~mosmd/turtle.htm), Reviewed 31 August 2016.

The Old Farmer's Almanac. Date unknown. Native American Names for Full Moons. The Old Farmer's Almanac web page (http://www.almanac.com/content/full-moon-names), Reviewed 25 August 2016.

Skywise Unlimited. Date unknown. American Indian Moons. On the Western Washington University website (https://www.wwu.edu/skywise/indianmoons.html), Reviewed on 22 August 2016.

Walker Jr., T. 1998 (11 March 1998 update). Oglala Calendar Moons from Black Elk Speaks. On T. Walker, Jr. (ed). Social Science & Social Ethics for the 21st Century: Here Instructed by Native American Social Wisdom, at the Southern Methodist University website (http://faculty.smu.edu/twalker/calendar.htm), Reviewed 22 August 2016.

Neihardt, J. G. 1932. Black Elk Speaks: the Life Story of an Oglala Holy Man. Univ of Nebraska Press.