Another World Running Parallel to My Own

"The Forest Unseen," by David George Haskell.  This is the last chapter.  Haskell reflects on the meaning of the year's watch.  There are several things that I like about this section.  First, rhetorically, the series of ideas/paragraphs, each succeeding one starts with a "despite" a "but," a "yet."  Subordinating his ideas to get to the very specific thing that he wants to communicate.  Second, the clarity of the line about "I am unnecessary here" and "there is loneliness in this realization, poignancy in my irrelevance."  Third, despite his "unnecessary"ness, the sense of "parallel worlds" that are running together.  The combination of the last two seems like real wisdom, deep understanding

Silence returns to the mandala. I sink into the moment, feeling a familiar sense of arrival.  The practice of returning to the mandala and sitting in silence for hundreds of hours has peeled back some of the barriers between the forest and my senses, intellect, and emotions.  I can be present in a way that I had not known existed.

Despite this feeling of belonging, my relationship to this place is not straightforward.  I simultaneously feel profound closeness and unutterable distance.  As I have come to know the mandala, I have more clearly seen my ecological and evolutionary kinship with the forest.  This knowledge feels woven into my body, remaking me or, more precisely, waking in me the ability to see how I was made all along.

At the same time, an equally powerful sense of otherness has grown.  As I have watched, a realization of the enormity of the my ignorance has pressed on me. Even simple enumeration and naming of the mandala's inhabitants lie far beyond my reach.  As understanding of their lives and relationships in anything but a fragmentary way is quite impossible.  The longer I watch, the more alienated I become from any hope of comprehending the mandala, of grasping its more basic nature.

Yet the separation that I feel is more than a heightened awareness of my ignorance. I have understood in some deep place that I am unnecessary here, as is all humanity. There is loneliness in this realization, poignancy in my irrelevance.

But I also feel an ineffable but strong sense of joy in the independence of the mandala's life. This was brought home to me several weeks ago as I walked into the forest. A hairy woodpecker lighted on a tree trunk and lobbed out its call. I was struck hard by the otherness of this bird. Here was a creature whose kind has chattered woodpecker calls for millions of years before humans came to be. Its daily existence was filled with bark flakes, hidden beetles, and the sounds of its woodpecker neighbors: another world, running parallel to my own.  Millions of such parallel worlds exist in one mandala.