Anna CK Smith Creative Media Design

I heard her footsteps down the hall as she approached the beloved door

I heard her touch the handle and slowly turn it

I heard her toss her hair as she took her first careful steps inside

I heard her throw her bag on the floor

I heard her books spill over the carpet and slide toward the wall

I heard her perfume as it danced around the room and clung to surfaces

I heard her as she peeled off her jacket and placed it on the bedside table

I heard her as she approached the bed and sighed heavily,

With a warm forgiveness in her breath, love in her eyes, and amusement on her mouth

I heard her sit down

I heard her as she smiled at the familiar shapes outlined in the bed,

Her mouth curving upwards, revealing perfect teeth set against perfect gums all the while holding a flawless serenity for her lover

I heard her mumble a greeting

And I heard a mumble back.

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The sight of the moon used to make me cry. I refused to look at it or even acknowledge its presence for most of my teens because of the influence of a children's book had on me. Of course it was not completely unavoidable, a giant disk of beautifully ominous light rained down every night through my windows reminding me of the Goddess Selene.

Selene was the Greek Goddess of the moon. She was siblings to Helios the God of sun and Eos Goddess of the dawn. Much like her brother she rode a chariot across the sky every night casting a peaceful and protective light. In most of her mythology she would cross the sky to be with her lover who had been put in a permanent sleep in a cave at the end of the horizon. I always thought about this detail when I saw her light coming through my window. Crossing the sky to be with and protect her one true love, even if he wasn’t even conscious of the fact.

I know this because in middle school I studied Greek mythology and focused on the three siblings of the sky for research projects, and in that research I found a painting by Jules Louis Machard from the 1870s. The painting depicts Selene poised in the sky with her bow as an alluring protector. The bow’s arch makes up the bright outer curvature of the moon, with the rest of the moon’s face in shadow. An ethereal light is cast from her head and body and an arrow is frozen in the moment right after she has released it. I take this to be a symbol of her wisdom and protective nature. I feel that her head radiates a warm and reassuring glow for the people below her as she uses her bow and arrow to protect the earth from foreign enemies. The whole painting is washed in warm colors, mostly golds, with no true blacks or whites used making it a low-contrast image with more of a focus on composition. I think that the low contrast and golden tones were intentional and provide a sense of idealization, like things are just a little too good to be true. The painting as a whole is a beautiful representation for the moon's way of watching over and protecting the land below it.

Comparatively my life has not had the same sense of wonderment. I was adopted from China, and part of my own mythology was that because of the one child policy, I was abandoned on a bench in the middle of a park. Like most adopted children, my parents did their best to help me understand my situation and provide me with the love and support I needed to grow up as a well adjusted and empathetic human being. A big part of that was helping me understand what it meant to be adopted. Growing up they tried to engage me by giving me lessons on my birth culture, taking me to events and enrolling me in camps all over the state but the more I learned, the less I wanted to keep learning. As much as being adopted was a part of me, in my adolescence I sought to ignore as much as I could of that huge part. I felt that my “real” parents (what I call my biological donors) had abandoned me and because of that I should abandon the idea of them. Despite this every year on January 14 or 16 my family would celebrate my adoption and give me a gift related to it.

One year my parents gave me a book called, We See the Moon. It is a children's book that chronicles some of the questions that an adopted child may ask their parents as they get older about their biological donors. It’s a little hard to sum up, but basically in the end the parents tell the kid that their birth parents wished they could answer those questions for the child and were sorry they couldn’t. The parents then direct the child to the moon, telling them that the beautiful moon they see is the same moon their birth parents have in their sky and then comes to the conclusion that whenever the child is looking up at the moon they should think of their birth parents, because that’s what they are doing. I’ve only ever read the book once. But it was enough.

In all honesty that book made me cry. Before that book I don’t think I ever really considered my biological donors as real people and the book humanized them for me in a way that I was unprepared for. Pretty soon after I stopped celebrating my adoption, I blocked my windows as much as I could at night to keep the moonlight out, and tucked the book as away as I could.

In Barry Lopez’s essay Learning to See, he states, “One of the great blessings of our modern age, a kind of redemption for its cruelties and unmitigated greed, is that one can walk down to a corner bookstore….and then be knocked across the room by a truth one had not, until that moment, clearly discerned,” (32). I felt this kind of epiphany hit me when I read that book. The first time I read it I felt like the air was sucked out of my lungs and the emotional pain I perceived was so agonizing I have not opened the book since. For so long I had held any feelings of remorse or compassion in and projected a protective shell of hate and rage around me to distance myself from my origins. Reading that book cracked my shell for the first time and forced me to challenge those antagonistic feelings. I now had to confront a separate and more sympathetic story in my mind that made me physically and mentally ache. Something I did not know how to deal with.

I started to literally fear the moon. I felt its light try to pull me out every night to look at it’s source and face the reality of my “true” parents. But I had decided long before that book that I really didn’t want anything to do with them. If they were going to push me out of their life and onto a park bench, I was going to do the same. But the moon changed everything. It made me empathetic towards whatever reason I was left out there in the cold and the reasons behind it. It made me feel like for 12 hours a day my biological parents were chasing me through the sky trying to connect with me. I felt that if the moonlight even touched me it was like an acceptance of what they did and that through the transitive property my biological parents were touching me, trying to comfort me. Every night.

In the essay Ways of Seeing, John Berger wrote that, “Soon after we can see, we are aware that we can also be seen. The eye of the other combines with our own eye to make it fully credible that we are part of this visible world,” (9). The kind of visual vulnerability Berger references is how I felt, and still feel, about the moon. As I was exposed to the moon the moon was also exposed to me.

Under most circumstances I can hide behind a smokescreen of indifference, but the moon exposes a defenseless side to me that cannot be hidden and will never go away. I have found solace in the painting of Selene because it is a good representative of this. The gentle gold tones that make up the majority of the piece are like a subtle gold wash of ignorance. They glorify what is in the frame but can’t completely conceal the true nature of a love story gone wrong. It is like a reminder that as much as you try to glamorize something, the reality of the situation will always shine through. This conclusion helped me get over the anxiety I felt over the moon and gave me an alternative face to look at when I saw the moon. The moon still makes my stomach flip sometimes, but the painting has helped me better understand and rationalize those feelings.

Selene’s love and the love portrayed in the book are somewhat the same. They both struggled for a love that they could never really have. They both crossed over the reaches of the earth to try and bring some amount of purpose and comfort to their lives and others. And most importantly they never gave up on that love despite the pain it brought with them.

And over the years my relationship with Selene has gradually transformed into something of a symbol of respectable acceptance of her guiding light and what it stands for.

Works Cited

Berger, John. "Ways of Seeing." Ways of Reading. Eds. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford St. Martins, 2011. 133-162. Print.

Lopez, Barry. “Learning to See.” Vintage Lopez. New York: Random House, 2004. 13-33.Print

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I’ve always liked being around people and talking with them about their passions, what they enjoy, what they are interested in, and giving them a space to explore themselves. In high school, I was part of several outreach programs that brought educational activities to local schools. This not only inspired learning, but helped encourage others to think about the future. Helping others learn is something I find rewarding, and to this end I have become an advocate for free and accessible education.

Education is important to me, and helping others learn is something I have found rewarding. During high school, I joined my local robotics team with the intent of learning more about science and engineering. Once I joined, I found it was also a great outlet to teach others. I worked with other teams in the area and around the world building robots and facilitating community outreach to get people interested in technology. One of the projects I worked on was creating and presenting educational activities for different age groups. I created a set of activities: making basic bridges and vehicles out of household materials to promote technological literacy and discovery. Watching parents and children engage with each other and educational materials clicked for me and made me realize that I want to help others learn and think about what’s possible. Encouraging others to learn basic engineering principles has reinforced my core value that education is for everyone.

At the moment my career goal is to be a designer of learning installations in museums. I feel that getting involved with community projects will foster a more connected and understanding public, a better overall spirit, and a stronger local community. I genuinely enjoy helping other people and plan to do it for the rest of my life.

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