1.

On the night of December 22, 2017, my companion and I are traveling east on US Route 264 through Navajo Nation, towards Chinle, when the sky to the south begins to glow. We notice something meandering above, accompanied by a white smoky haze. We think it is a helicopter, maybe monitoring a brushfire? It moves, we come to a stop. A long snake of cars stops on the shoulder with us.

We step out and watch for a few minutes. The car directly in front of us belongs to a Navajo firefighting unit, and the driver gets out and we talk. Whatever is in the sky is not a helicopter. There is no internet here. We are disconnected. Is it the end of the world? Is it the beginning?

After a bit, the phenomenon fades and we go back to our individual cars and journeys, puzzled. We are disconnected. No signal, no answers. The valley glows with scattered home-lights, patterns not unlike those etched by the stars above. The Moon is a sliver of mirror; tomorrow she will be unseen, or new, as some say. Here, in Navajo Nation, this is the time when the Moon and the Sun visit one another, traveling together.¹

Later, connected, we learn that the wandering glow was a SpaceX rocket, launched from a military base in California, carrying ten communication satellites into orbit. Once our world had a single satellite. There are many thousands now.

2.

The Rosh Chodesh, the “head of the month,” was part of how we learned time in my Hebrew school. Time was confused by the overlay of Jewish lunar months on the Christian calendar. Having two birthdays made age seem fungible. As a child, I believed that the Hebrew calendar was a lunar calendar, but it isn’t one. It’s a lunisolar calendar, melding solar and lunar cycles. A calendar of months sung in prayer.

Approximately a year ago, I asked my friends: Do you, or does anyone you know of, use a lunar calendar to the exclusion of a solar or lunisolar calendar?

Listening and digging, I found that perhaps no body of human beings may have lived under an exclusively lunar calendar since the Stone Age.

Approximately thirteen moons ago, I asked myself: Is it possible to live under a lunar calendar?

What would such a life reveal? What happens when you measure life in months instead of years? How would you interface with the databases that underlie digitized capitalism? Where to begin?

One begins with one’s own body, of course. Has science fiction taught us nothing?

3.

Like many transfeminine persons, I inject estradiol valerate each week, and, like the spiritually Queer person I am, I was already bound to the Moon, so thirteen moons ago, I synchronized my injection cycle to the phases of the Moon. It is, as experiments go, a small and private one. It doesn’t require permission.

I bought a calendar that tracks lunar phases. Daily life began to follow the Moon. Each night, I spend a moment reflecting on and in her reflection. I remind faraway people to remember that we are under the same Moon, at the same time.

I have my little ritual. On the night of each of the Moon’s phases, I wait for the Moon to rise, then I gather my materials: the thumb-sized vial of estradiol, a single-use syringe, single-use alcohol pads, and a cloth Band-Aid. My materials made ready, I shoot like many of my kin, finding a spot on the thigh that feels right and is free of veins, purifying it with cool alcohol, drawing my dosage, and inserting the full length of the needle into the muscle. Then, I plunge.

On the night of the full Moon, as the Earth turns from the Sun, the Moon rises, eternal, bright, and smooth. One more month is marked on a journey that took one lifetime to set out on. My time, this new lifetime, follows the Moon’s cycle, and my cycle follows hers, and each month fullness and newness wax and wane. A tide of blood and time coming into being in a long-still ocean.

So, fellow Moonwatcher, I ask you: What is your relationship to the Moon? What does she mean to you?

The Earth travels now with many, many thousands of satellites. On any given day, in their invisible way, many of them touch your life. But only one satellite sings the tides, and you, Moonwatcher, are an ocean.