If Monday marks the resumption of normal life, today is the first real Monday of the year, the Monday of all. The alarm clock is more tiring, we all have our existential time zone with us. In fact, our level of happiness depends on the distance between Monday and joy: if ordinary life is a condemnation, Monday is the worst enemy.
But on the day dedicated to the moon, Lunae, a female deity who made it auspicious for fertility and growth, for sowing and home, for memories and stories, dies. All meanings have been undermined by the culture of efficiency, which sees Monday as the first “non-free” day, since we have become accustomed to perceiving only the time without work as “free”, as if work is just a condemnation and not the The most important place would be creative skills and relationships.
However, the good taste of the lunar day is preserved in the expression “honeymoon”, which denoted the first month of marriage, both because the entire female cycle took place in this month, and because the spouses ate honey or drank mead, as it was actually believed that the bee product had aphrodisiac and fertilizing properties.
On this first Monday of all Mondays in 2024, I wondered if there was a way to convey some of that joy without it being the deceptive “moon in the well,” a way to suggest the illusion that im Water is the moon and not a simple reflection. What is missing from our montages so that they are a bit “sweetheart”?
I recently returned from my “honeymoon” and would like to find some answers to the question in some features of this “lunar” period. The first thing you look for is the extraordinary: you go “to the moon”, to distant, more or less exotic places, to discover the never seen. In our case it was the landscapes of Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, from Cape Horn, the southernmost point of the inhabited areas, to the Patagonian steppe, past an impressive glacial area, third after Antarctica and Greenland. In these countries Magellan found the passage in 1519 to reach the Pacific for the first time and complete the first circumnavigation of the earth. Here the young Darwin recognized the dynamics that governed the species and understood its logic. With us were people from all over the world: couples, families, friends, tour groups… What did we all have in common and what stood between us and these intrepid explorers of the past? We were looking for the little miracle that normal life doesn't seem to grant us. We were looking for what Argentines and Chileans, who carefully share a surprising ecosystem, call “miradores”, our “belvederes”, points from which we can admire things we have never seen before with our mouths open .
“Mirador” comes from the Latin “mirare,” which you can’t help but look at, from the same root as “miracle” and “admire.” We often lose the ability not to believe miracles but to see them and yet have them before our eyes. To make Monday less Monday, we need “miradores”, “belvederes”, i.e. “contemplative” moments, a few minutes to marvel again at something that we take for granted. To do this you have to stop and focus your attention, as if you were taking a photograph of the past with a film: you couldn't fail and then you had to wait for the result, and it was like rediscovering the thing you photographed. For me, for example, it can mean paying particular attention to attractiveness so that it is a “lookout” for the children: What do I see that I have never seen before? Or spend a few minutes looking at something other than your cell phone, take an analog photo of something obvious, and then “develop” it in the “dark room” of your heart: a place, an event, a person…
In the south of the earth, between icebergs and penguins, between waterfalls and whales, it seemed as if we were seeing for the first time the wonder of the world in which we found ourselves. And that makes us fall in love with life again. The second obvious thing about the honeymoon, perhaps underestimated for this reason, is that you share everything with someone without a break, and the miracle is honey, an “aphrodisiac” that makes the relationship more lively.
However, it is not enough to find beauty, it is necessary to share it, which means multiplying it. Nowadays we do it with social media that allows us to share everything instantly, but for this very reason we risk showing it before we even receive it, but we can share (share) without it disappearing, just that which we possessed before and which we remembered: flesh of our flesh, of life, from which we can draw at any time after the moment enjoyed (this is the difference between happiness and sensation; the first is a state that we can have at any time the second is a feeling that is lost with the moment in which we find ourselves). generated). And the photo with this background will not be enough to renew the life received (perhaps our clinging to thousands of photos is evidence of our difficulty in calmly accepting the present and then keeping it with us forever?), if this background has not become The basis: 14 billion years of the universe are justified precisely because two people can talk about it with wonder and make it an eternal memory of their relationship.
The third aspect I would like to emphasize is that all this does not create magic, no moon in the well, no spell cast on the ordinary to hide it, because the ordinary continues to impose itself even on the honeymoon, but one has done it We have the energy to accept it, we laugh at weaknesses, limitations, obsessions, everything that makes us afraid of being unlovable, and we make it a field of tenderness rather than of incomprehension, of grace instead of distance.
They are just ideas that may be useful so that Monday can become the day of the moon thanks to three ingredients: wonder, remembrance, mercy. Three m's to “make ends meet,” the moon returns in this iconic expression used to indicate our ability to get what we need to survive. Arriving in port at the end of the year, the moon was actually the popular almanac that signaled the lunar phases, days and months of the year. Then I wish you a year 2024 in which “making ends meet” is not about survival, but about finding what makes life more lively, a little honey on Monday too, so that it is at least a little bit of a honeymoon .