At four in the morning, I’ve already been up for two hours. It’s good writing time, this part of the morning, none better, but there’s also a bridge in the southern part of Echols County that needs one hundred eighty-five cubic yards of concrete before the sun comes up and the heat rises. The balance between two worlds, one with concrete and steel, and the other with writing, swings towards hard reality, and I’m on State Route 94, heading east, and watching the moon rise.

If you ever go to Statenville Georgia, and you’re on 94 heading east, the moment you cross over the Statenville city limits, you’ve started the journey into The Big Empty. Until Fargo is reached, twenty-five miles away or so, there’s very little but trees and trees and trees. There’s a house here and there, one paved road going to the left, two going to the right, and everything looks smaller or further away in The Big Empty. Deer, wild hogs, open spaces, planted pines, and ditches full of water, for the Okefenokee is near but damn little else. If you need some time to think about something, you will find it here.

The radio is off as I streak through the night, speeding for me, because I always drive slowly. The Crescent Moon is flirting intimately with Venus. It’s easy to see why the followers of Islam love the crescent moon, and why they might be compelled to add a star near it, if you’ve ever watched the sliver of the moon rise with Venus. In a time without unnatural lights, at least not the ocean of them we have created, it would be glorious for a religion to associate itself with the sight before me. Despite why the news tells you, and contrary to the recent history you might read, Islam had been a civilized religion for many centuries. True enough, there have been many wars, but the art, the architecture, and the appreciation of beauty by the adherents of that religion speaks to the soul of humanity, like all artwork will at this time of morning.

It’s easy to be a peace in The Big Empty, with Venus, and a Crescent Moon. I wonder if it was Venus, the Goddess of Love, who put the star on the flag of Islam, and maybe more people should wonder this. Please, don’t try to start a debate about what this side did or that side did, let’s just enough natural darkness that had a great light show with planetary objects, shall we? Just this once?

The radio is still off, I’m listening to the road, and the sky. The moon is huge, slung down low, and I can tell it has risen slowly since I began. How do you think it felt to watch this sight, thousands of years ago, with nothing but the sound of the world around you? The yellow orange moon, with just a slight touch of silver around the disk, a start or a planet blazing in the sky as the moon rises, who could not feel something supernatural here?

The real world intrudes, and harshly so. The artificial glare from the works lights blast out the night sky. There’s enough men here to form football teams with substitutes, and the concrete will arrive soon. Thousands of years old, concrete is still fickle and tricky. Heat, water, and a thousand other variables haunt each pour, and every mistake will be permanent, perhaps even catastrophic. I must return to the world of brought lights, and steel, and stern men who fear the loss of money, and thrive on the work that few understand.

Yet as the work begins, the concrete pours into the forms, the steel is buried for a hundred years or more, and sweat becomes the more important ingredient of the morning, I take time to watch the moon rise higher and higher, and Venus is subdued by the starlight of the rising sun.

Take Care,

Mike