I’ve been gardening interspersed with reading Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” poems randomly selected from Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest and Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. All the while I have been deeply conscious of the fact that the moon has been crossing the day-sky unseen.

The moon rose sometime around midnight (it is at last quarter) and is, as I sit here writing, close to setting. It will set before dark, and since I have been poorly this weekend, it was daylight before I woke and so, for this day, although I can feel the tidal pull of the moon on my awareness, I have not seen it for at least two days now.

I feel better today, having slept the lion’s share of two days and when I went out this morning for tea, the garden presented itself as a “must do.”  Some plants are still strong, even though the nights have been a bit frosty, but others have long since died back. The tomatoes, cilantro, the lupins, the sweetgrass and the poppies have become dried letters from summer.  When I pulled the dead tomatoe branches today, there was a faint smell left, and I even found one small orange tomatoe left clinging to a wizened branch. The poppies dried to leave architecturally beautiful seed pods on elegant stems.  I have saved those and put them dry into a ceramic pot outside my door. On dark moon next I’ll cut back the lupin pods and place them there along with the poppies.

The moon will be in Cancer at the moment, sinking to the horizon, just north of west. That’s how it feels, that the moon in Cancer is sinking to the west, but of course what is really happening is that I, on a spinning earth, am backing away as I stand and look to where I know the moon to be – that as I spin backwards, the edge of the earth is rising up and hiding constellation after constellation, until finally, it will hide a moon already hidden.

What has that to do with Searle and poetry? More on that after I go pull the remaining leeks.