oneness and otherness

The spirit is the same; it is the spirit that is shared, held in common, lovingly passed on.

Not blood, or land. If I say land, then that is because it is the land that has given birth to the life of the spirit, because it is a reflection of it. And it is that which I re-call, that I fondly remember.

Fact may blossom into truth, the temporary into the eternal. Do not mourn what is lost, for in truth nothing is lost. This play of shadow and light, exhalation and inhalation, is with us always. Everything moves in a circle, everything can be deep if you place yourself at the right angle to the universe and are drawn to it.Learn the meaning of 'and'.Remember the colours.One is not a number.

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Two angels among the throng of angels
paused in the upward abyss, facing angel to angel.

Blue and green glowed the wing feathers
of one angel, from red to gold the sheen
of the other’s.

These two, so far as angels may dispute, were poised
on the brink of dispute, brink of fall from angelic stature,
for these tall ones, angels whose wingspan encompasses entire
earthly villages, whose heads if their feet touched earth
would top pines or redwoods, live by their vision’s harmony
which sees at one glance the dark and light of the moon.

These two hovered dazed before one another,
for one saw the sea feathered, peacock breakered
crests of the other angel’s magnificence, different from his own,
and the other’s eyes flickered with vision of
flame petallings, cream-gold grainfeather glitterings,
the wings of his fellow, and both in immortal danger of dwindling,
of dropping into the remote forms of a lesser being.

But as these angels, the only halted ones
among the many who passed and repassed,
trod air as swimmers tread water, each gazing on the angelic wings of
the other, the intelligence proper to great angels flew into their wings,
the intelligence called intellectual love, which,
understanding the perfection’s of scarlet,
leapt up among blues and greens strong shafted,
and among amber down illumined the sapphire bloom,
so that each angel was iridescent with the strange newly-seen
hues he watched; and their discovering pause
and the speech their silent interchange of perfection was
never became a shrinking to opposites,
and they remained free in the heavenly chasm,
remained angels, but dreaming angels,
each imbued with the mysteries of the other.

Denise Levertov