Denise Levertov – Sept 20, Iyengar III

What we do, this practice, is not common, or simple or easy. Why do we choose it? For the light ? Because it it is “the path between reality and the soul”?

A Common Ground

III

. . . everything in the world must excel itself to be itself.

Pasternak

Not 'common speech’

a dead level

but the uncommon speech of paradise,

tongue in which oracles

speak to beggars and pilgrims:

not illusion but what Whitman called

'the path

between reality and the soul,

a language

excelling itself to be itself,

speech akin to the light

with which at days end and day's

renewal, mountains

sing to each other across the cold valleys.