Noa and the moon:

A dime of comfort in the sky

“Noa, why do you like the moon so much?” I asked my four-year-old recently.

“I can’t explain it,” she said.

The love affair started at two. We were traveling in Dresden, where the crescent moon topped centuries-old buildings like something out of a fairy tale. Noa’s questions began on a walk through the woods. Why does the moon change places? Where does it go when we can’t see it? What’s a “horizon”? I learned a lot from answering, like horizons are hard things to explain. I also learned the moon shows the same face to everyone in the world, but in the Southern Hemisphere hangs like a smile and in the Northern falls like a frown. She met our answers with more questions. Her fascination seems born in, like a kid the animals come to without calling.

It’s a passion with ripple effects. I reconnected with a favorite college professor recently who said that Noa’s love of the moon—described in a holiday card years ago—endeared her to him without them meeting. She’s changed how I look at the sky too. On busy days when I notice myself walking with my head down, more often now I remember to look up and check see if the moon is out. I devoured stories last month about the Artemis II mission around the moon’s far side. During the first human departure from earth’s orbit since 1972, the astronauts were treated to a total solar eclipse. I watched their module parachute down to earth on my 42^nd birthday with tears in my eyes. I wouldn’t have appreciated it so much without Noa’s influence.

Do the words “far side of the moon” give you shivers too?

Growing up, I was more interested in the Big Bang and the expanding universe than anything as close as the moon. (Not just growing up; I recently loved reading Reality Is Not What It Seems—The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli, which puts the evolution of theoretical physics in plain language.) The scope of space is impossible to comprehend, and even trying points out our glorious insignificance. If we are so small, the stakes of any choice we make don’t feel as high. Could anything be more freeing? And yet our planet holds the only life of our kind that we know of. We are both gloriously insignificant and strangely significant. This paradox has lived in me since I was a high-school senior finding comfort in reading about Einstein and mystery, the “most beautiful thing we can experience” and the “source of all true art and science.”

I know not everyone shares this sentiment. I’ve had friends say they find the universe vaguely terrifying, and they’d rather not learn anything more about it.

For all of us, maybe, the moon is a happy compromise. It’s close enough for us to circle in a spaceship or with a finger pointed at the sky. We’ve touched its surface and studied its dust. It gives perspective while reassuring us with its constancy.

My professor closed a recent email by saying to “please tell Noa the next time looking at the moon that your friend Jerry is looking at the same moon in California.”

“Oh,” she said when I told her. “Let’s look for the moon tonight.”

“Okay, love.”

“It’s been too long since I’ve seen it.”

For Ben, who would have turned 40 today.