Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
“More and more, in a place like this,” the great naturalist John Muir wrote while beholding Yosemite for the first time, “we feel ourselves part of wild Nature, kin to everything.”
We could lament that the price we have paid for our so-called progress in the century and half since Muir has been a loss of perspective blinding us to this essential kinship with the rest of nature.
But that would be a thoroughly ahistorical lament. We humans have always had a troubled relationship with this awareness — from the pre-Copernican days, when we hailed ourselves as the center of the universe, to the campaign launched against Darwin for demonstrating our evolutionary consanguinity to every single creature on this beautiful planet.Still, something deep inside us — something elemental, beyond the ego and its conscious reasonings — vibrates with an irrepressible sense of our belonging to and with nature. Rachel Carson, to whom I dedicated the 2018 edition of The Universe in Verse, captured this intuitive sense perfectly in her assertion that “there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.”
That deep-seated response is what Denise Levertov (October 24, 1923–December 20, 1997) celebrated in a splendid poem titled “Sojourns in the Parallel World,” found…
The post Sojourns in the Parallel World: America Ferrera Reads Denise Levertov’s Ode to Our Ambivalent Relationship with Nature appeared first on FeedBox.