Moon Walk

Last night the wilderness writing workshop went on a walk to view the full moon, but we didn't see it during the walk itself. That is because first, we timed the walk wrong, thinking the moon would rise by 8, but it wasn't set to rise till 8:45, and then it had to make it over the canyon walls at Black Star. But it was a lovely evening.
First we held a little workshop at which we discussed a short piece of semi-fictional prose about the caretaker of the dam at Santiago Canyon. Then we discussed my sestina, which I am still in the process of revising. I explained what a sestina was and why I chose to write in that form (in any form, really) for people who knew little about poetry. Then people made a few good suggestions, based largely on correcting facts I had not quite gotten right in the poem.
Then we walked down the trail and chose a place to sit in our folding chairs in silence. I didn't write anything of note, but I am thinking about something about our star talk, which took place after we walked back to our starting point and settled to wait for the moon, which as I said, didn't arrive as planned. But in the meantime, Bob, the docent who had written the piece about the Dam Man, talked to us about constellations and individual stars and the speed of light and whether the universe is infinite. He told us that aboriginal people on both sides of the globe have the same name for the Great Bear. All delicious food for thought. Using a laser pointer, he traced out the constellations, naming plenty of stars I had never heard of. His laser pointer was like a stream of multi-colored particles, as you'd imagine Saturn's rings, only of course, much smaller.
As we drove out of the canyon, there was the moon, an extraordinary shade of burnt orange, like a chrysanthemum (sp) and more three dimensional in that black black sky full of stars than I had ever witnessed it.