Abiding Companionship

There is a real world.  It exists just outside our door, our window, our car.  It surrounds us on the way to work, rolls out in front of us as we cross the parking lot, sweeps off the edges of the sidewalks and down the streets where we live.  It is the world of landscape we have deserted for the world of things.  It is here now, streaming into every wrench and heave of our lives.  Cast aside like a forgotten lover,caught up in our affair with ourselves, it remains steadfast and long suffering. And when we have lost our way, emptied our spirits and given over to despair, it is  where each of us can return and be restored to ourselves and to the world.

  We live our lives of human passions,

cruelties, dreams, concepts,

crimes and the exercise of virtue

in and beside a world devoid

of our preoccupations, free

from apprehension--though affected,

certainly, by our actions.  A world

parallel to our own though overlapping.

We call it 'Nature'; only reluctantly

admitting ourselves to be 'Nature' too.

Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,

our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,

an hour even, of pure (almost pure)

response to that insouciant life:

cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing

pilgrimage of water, vast stillness

of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,

animal voices, mineral hum, wind

conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering

of fire to coal--then something tethered

in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch

of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.

No one discovers

just where we've been, when we're caught up again

into our own sphere (where we must

return, indeed, to evolve our destinies)

---but we have changed, a little.

Denise Levertov, Sojourns in the Parallel World