Moon over Catskills

I once had a discussion with a scientific rationalist friend who told me a story of a woman dying and the clock near her bed ceasing to work at the moment she took her last breath. The family member at her side believed this was proof her spirit had left her body and caused the clock to stop. My friend would refuse to take such coincidence as proof of anything. The point I made was that ultimately it mattered less to us whether the spirit story was true, than the psychological effect of the clock stopping. I was thinking that was a perfectly respectable and wonderfully pragmatic response. That was many years ago. I don't really reject objective observation of surface reality and consider it important and useful. But I don't embrace it as whole truth either. Tonight driving home what I saw in front of me was dusk on a very early spring evening. The Catskills were a dark purple haze blending with the softening indigo of the sky and the moon a bright bare sliver pointed downward toward the earth. I now believe (and science heading this way too) that it does matter that my experience of that moon, large on the horizon, changed me and that the effect of my change is not "just" psychological, because when my interior experience changes, the arrangement of matter changes. We feed the Earth around us with our bodily experience of its beauty and splendor.