To My Companions on the High Seas

I am thinking of you

Each one of you

One at a time

As is my wont.

I love each of you

With the clarity

And straightforwardness

I love nature.

I like to look at you

The way I look

At hummingbirds or hawks

In their flights and pauses

Or at Venus and the Pleiades

In the evening sky

Or at a flowering peach tree

Or a night-blooming cereus.

For better or for worse

I think human nature is

Being a part of all nature

As you and I surely are.

What else we are

I do not know

But I do know

We can think and laugh and care.

And it is true

Our hearts can be battered

By three-personed

Or other gods

Or our griefs lifted

By those same gods

Or other journeyers

From time to time.

We have our perils

Our terrors

And we know high joy

As in a waterfall.

We are like rainbows

Sometimes like mountains

In majesty and comfort

And we lift eyes to each other.

We are like sand

Shifting in winds that call us

Yet know a continuity:

We know each other.

We are a part

Of that great unison

Of earth, air, fire, water

Rotating through forms

Hearing echoes, calls

Answering with no more choice

Than electron to proton

In our time, in time.

We must answer.

The quality of song, the lilt

We can do something about

But we must answer.

                          - Lois Langland, Professor of Psychology Emerita, Scripps College   

                            Psychological Perspectives, Issue #22, Spring 1990