I'm Will Dowd, and I have a confession: I'm completely infatuated with the Moon.
When I was a kid, I considered the Moon a close personal friend. I knew the massive satellite was on decent terms with the rest of humanity, but the two of us had something special.
Like a painted portrait whose eyes follow you around the room, the Moon always seemed to be watching me. Of all the windows in the world, it would choose mine to shine through. During those interminable family road trips, the Moon would race along the highway, precisely matching our car's speed—a celestial ally who always took my side in whatever sibling squabble was raging in the backseat.
Now, as an adult, I return the favor. I watch the Moon. I chase it across archives, newswires, and mythologies. I write about it because we're living through something profound that most people don't realize:
The Moon you glimpse tonight is the same Moon that the earliest lyric poets wrote about, that the ancient Egyptians worshipped (when they weren’t venerating their cats), that the first humans gazed up at through jungle fronds. There's something profound about that continuity—a thread connecting us to every human who has ever lived.
But in the coming decades, our silent companion could transform into something unrecognizable—as nuclear reactors and space casinos pock its ancient face. We are perhaps the final generation to enjoy this long-lived sight.
So why not join this growing community of fellow moon-lovers in receiving one free, luminous newsletter each month?
Let’s savor these full moons while we still can.
Let’s be lunatics together.
What lands in your inbox every full moon
This is not a news digest. Not a science lesson. These are midnight musings—short essays written in the spirit of friendship and curiosity for those who still believe the mundane can be transcendent when it catches the light just right.
I write to one reader. A long-lost pal. A soul friend. Maybe that's you.
Sometimes these dispatches are about astronomy, sometimes mythology, sometimes art. Often they're about solitude, and connection, and the cosmically strange.
For example: Did you know the Moon is 400 times smaller than our Sun and 400 times closer to Earth, a freak coincidence that creates perfect solar eclipses? (Some fringe thinkers propose this means the Moon is artificial. If that's true, hats off to the lunar sculptors.)
A way of marking time with wonder
I created The Lunar Dispatch because I wanted to keep a ritual: a way of marking time with wonder instead of urgency. A way of staying awake to beauty, even when the world feels unbearable.
Some people suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, their mood plummeting when winter pulls its gray hoodie over the Sun. I'm afflicted by a milder phenomenon—New Moon Blues. Like the night sky, I feel a little empty when the Moon is MIA. But once the cosmos throws me even the thinnest of crescents, I cheer right up.
In a way, I think of this newsletter as a strange form of Tsukimi— the Japanese practice of throwing lunar picnic parties under the harvest moon, which dates back over a thousand years. I say we politically agitate for a bank holiday every full moon. We'll need the day off to gather our picnic blankets, our bottles of wine, and our moon pies.
You're invited to the party
While an actual ticket to the Moon costs around $750 million, this newsletter is completely free. Why? Because it's so much fun to write, and I love sharing these short reads with my Substack community.
If you’ve ever looked up and felt less alone, you're already one of us.
Subscribe here, and I'll meet you at the next full moon!
—WD
I rarely saw the moon until I left my city of tall buildings (Paris) and started to travel the world. Now I look for that wonder of moon almost every night.