Sojourns In The Parallel World
We live our lives of human passions,cruelties, dreams, concepts,crimes and the exercise of virtuein and beside a world devoidof our preoccupations, freefrom apprehension—though affected,certainly, by our actions.
A worldparallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantlyadmitting 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 dancingpilgrimage of water, vast stillnessof spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,animal voices, mineral hum, windconversing with rain, ocean with rock, stutteringof fire to coal—then something tetheredin us, hobbled like a donkey on its patchof gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free.
No one discoversjust where we've been, when we're caught up againinto our own sphere (where we mustreturn, indeed, to evolve our destinies)—but we have changed, a little.
Denise Levertov
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