Moon Slide and Once

I've been watching the moon slide across my office window this morning—an imperfect, downward-tilted globe. Every time I look up it has escaped to somewhere new, so that just now it passes behind a fringe of trees, limbs incandescent with new buds.

Just now: trapped in the cradle of angled branches.

I remain off the page—hung up myself in some ambiguous writerly space. Ambivalent? My mind keeps returning to a movie I watched Friday evening—the movie "Once," which must be watched by anyone who cares at all about how stories get made, how love gets answered. It's a simple enough story about an Irish busker, the girl he meets, the time they spend making songs, but really: it goes much deeper than that. John Carney, who wrote and directed the movie, made the whole thing for less than $150,000, made it the way he wanted it made, hiring musicians who he thought might be able to act, as opposed to actors who might be taught to sing. He was guided, he has said, by tone as opposed to plot. He allowed scenes to develop at the distance of a long lens. He cleared a path for the authentic, and it shows, and I'm sitting with that, I'm trying to translate it toward anything I might choose to do—today, tomorrow, sooner or later.

The moon has gone pink on me, the color of the birthing sun.