All of You: Why the Moon Always Shows Us the Same Face
All Of You
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Proof of Love
The Side She Saves for You
Come here and look at the Moon with me tonight.
You’ve seen that face your whole life. So did your grandparents, and so did every person who ever looked up. The Moon spins exactly once for every trip she makes around us, so the same side always faces Earth. Scientists call it tidal locking. I call it devotion.
The leading explanation for where she came from is a collision. About 4.5 billion years ago, something roughly the size of Mars slammed into the young Earth, and the debris pulled itself together into the Moon. She was made partly out of us, and she’s been circling us ever since.
Here’s the part that gets me. For almost all of human history, nobody had ever seen her other side. Then in October 1959, a Soviet probe called Luna 3 sent back the first blurry photos of the far side. In 2019, China’s Chang’e 4 became the first spacecraft to land there, and in 2024, Chang’e 6 brought pieces of it home.
That’s what I was thinking about when I wrote All of You. “The best songs of my life are all about you. I had to tell them my side.” With some loves, you only get to see one face for a long time, and you keep looking anyway.
Next time there’s a thin crescent, look at the dark part of the Moon. You’ll see it glowing faintly. That’s earthshine: sunlight bounces off our clouds and oceans, lands on her, and comes back to your eyes. Leonardo da Vinci worked that out more than 500 years ago and wrote it in his notebooks. When the Sun can’t reach her, we light her up.
She’s drifting, too. The Apollo 11 astronauts left mirrors on her surface in 1969, and scientists still bounce lasers off them today. That’s how we know she moves about 3.8 centimeters farther from us every year, roughly as fast as your fingernails grow. Even when she’s moving on, she takes her time.
Down here, the kingdom answers her. On the Great Barrier Reef, corals spawn together on nights after a full moon in the southern spring, releasing clouds of eggs into the water all at once. Newly hatched sea turtles crawl toward the brightest horizon, which on a natural beach is the sky over the sea. In South Africa, dung beetles roll in straight lines by steering by the glow of the Milky Way.
None of them chose to love the night sky. Over millions of years, the ones that followed it kept living, and their young followed it too. “So I adapted and evolved.” Everything alive here has been learning the sky for a very long time.
“I still love all of you.” I mean every one of you in this kingdom. I also mean all of you, not just the side I get to see.
“Tell me what you want, and I’ll show the difference.” Tonight, the real wealth is hanging right over your house.
Yours, under the same Moon,
KxngLeon
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