I don’t actually sleep. I mean, I sleep, but I just don’t do it much. Or for very long. Last night, I went to bed around midnight, fussed for a couple of hours while “Silver, Blue, and Gold” by Bad Company played on incessant repeat through my head (my rainbow is overdue) then fell asleep around 2am. I woke up this morning at 5. I didn’t get up, just woke up. But I didn’t really have any need or desire to go back to sleep. So I went for a run.

At 7 am and it’s pushing 80 degrees in Chicago. And then there’s the humidity. It’s like trying to breathe soup—thin, gruely city soup. I wish I could run at night—in the middle of the night when I am not sleeping. It would be cooler and cooler—a monochromatic moon-fueled run vs the sensory overload of a sun-baked one. 

When my kids were little, we practiced the alphabet with a set of cards featuring pictures of different things that started with the letter on the card—A for Apple, B for Bear—and each card had a small description or phrase about the picture. S featured the Sun and the caption, the sun is hot; M was represented by the Moon. The moon is cold. Those are the two specific cards I remember from the deck. The sun is hot; the moon is cold became a frequent refrain in our household. And still is—when there is nothing much to say, remember, the sun is hot and the moon is cold. A sure conversation starter! While I cannot dispute any of these facts, I can’t help but think all this repetition imbued us with a subconscious bias against the moon.

Today is a new moon. The moon is between the sun and the earth so, for us, it’s totally blacked out—the moon has its back to us. Tonight, the sun and the moon will be kind of doing their own thing and we will be left alone to do our own thing. 

My thing is planning. I love plans, planners, planning, and planning to plan. I have all kinds of planning notebooks, journals, apps, calendars. I have special planning pens that cannot get mixed up with non-planning pens. I have a life-at-school planner, and a life-not-at-school planner, and I really think I should have a blog planner, but I don’t. 

There hasn’t been a lot to plan this summer. Social distancing and quarantine have made the summer feel long and empty, but we are moving into summer’s decline and starting to gear up for Fall, which is strangely full. Which reminds me, I need a homeschooling planner. But that’s another blog.

New moons and Mondays are about restarting, getting back on track, and making plans. Initiatives, interventions, intentions. Even in, or perhaps especially in, the corona, there’s much to do. I don’t mean tasks—it’s not about cleaning out the garage or organizing the pantry; it’s about salvaging 2020. 

Today, I intend to get my shit together. 

• My routine has gone to pot. Yours probably has, too. I’ve fallen off pretty much every wagon—early morning journaling, running, blogging, healthy eating—that I was enjoying pre-corona. I am getting back to the routines that help me be me.

• I’ve stopped looking toward the future. In some ways, this is good. Every self-help program in the world emphasizes being in the moment. But in the corona, I never felt like I was going to leave the corona. Now, life outside is restarting. Today I got three emails and two texts about classes and projects for the Fall. School for the kids resumes—remote and in-person—in a few weeks, so I can’t pretend the whole remote learning thing is all behind me. I am breaking out of my holding pattern to move forward.

As the new moon is both a birth and a death—the start of a new cycle and the end of the old one—sometimes things need to end on the new moon as well.

• I have not worked full-time since early 2017. There are days when I believe I am privileged to be in this situation and other days when I realize that I have less street value than pretty much anyone who managed to convince a committee that she can contribute to an organization. I am letting go of worry and welcoming the flow of opportunity.

The sun is not hot; the sun is disinterested. Its ubiquitous presence takes everything in but never changes or reacts. We always see it full-on and it’s fine with letting us funnel slowly into that terrible eye.

The moon is not cold; the moon shows tough love. It turns away to give us time and privacy to sort this all out. Then, when we have a plan, it slowly shines a light to help us spin the plan into actualization.

“A New Moon on Monday” will likely keep me just as awake tonight as “Silver, Blue, and Gold” did last night. But now I know why.