One time I sat down in a lawn chair in my front yard to watch the moon rise. If the skies are clear tonight (unlikely if as cloudy as it is right now), I should do the same again for the biggest full moon of 2012 – called a perigee moon or supermoon.

The moon will be full and closest to the Earth at about 11:35 pm EDT but the moon always looks bigger when it is first rising than when it is overhead, an optical illusion that scientists don’t precisely understand. On the East Coast where I live, moon rise will be at about 7:46 pm.

This year’s perigee moon has been much abuzz in the media – it was even part of the news broadcast on WBSM talk radio out of New Bedford, MA that I listened to while driving to work this morning.

My meditation teacher Sri Chinmoy employed imagery of the moon in his poetry and prose quite frequently. The Jharna-Kala Card Company published a small gift book in 1995 called Sun, Moon, Stars with poems by Sri Chinmoy. One moon poem from the book is especially perfect for today’s super moon.

May my heart
every day
dance with
the rising moon.
-Sri Chinmoy

Sri Chinmoy also offered insight into the symbolism of the moon from a spiritual point of view in a talk he gave at Cornell University on Concentration, Meditation and Contemplation. About the moon, he states:

And before we contemplate, we should in silence imagine the moon, the beauty of the moon, which is the emblem, here on the earth, of the Absolute Supreme. The beauty of the moon represents the Consciousness of the Divine Mother. The Mother aspect of the Supreme Beloved is embodied by the moon. So if we imagine the moon, then the beauty, delight, sweetness, nearness and closeness of the Absolute Supreme we feel operating in and through us.

Sri Chinmoy, Palmistry, Reincarnation And The Dream State, Agni Press, 1977

I am always fascinated by Sri Chinmoy’s perspective on the inner meaning of the world around us. To read more on the moon from his writings, just search the online library of his writings and type in the word moon in the search box.

To learn more about the scientific details about the perigee moon, read this article from Earthsky.org.

And to read other blog posts about the moon by me – more moon musings