It is while living in the hills that I feel the force of Nature.
In its duality.
The long walks through sunsets
The early rising with the sun
Slopes of wild flowers, level and precipitous.
A peeping gazania in my garden, a blackbird gazing at the sky.
Pumpkin, red chillies, cummin drying on terraces.

The thrift.
A village woman scrambles down my garden slope
cuts an unwieldy hedge
separates leaves from twigs
for fodder and for warmth
hoisting a head load home.
In her ragged sweater she glances up at the hill deity -
her snow-capped mother, Nanda Devi
and her sense of sacred communion communicates. 

A storm communicates.
I listen to its tumultuous rhythms, its rage                                                                                                                     
I speak to it and tell it I am afraid
It speaks to me and tells me we are one.
Power outages follow, roadblocks.
No movement, no journeys for days
till rocks and trees are cleared,
Storms are spent….but not sunrises nor the sunsets
The tattoo of a woodpecker, and a log being spliced,
The springing up of a healing herb, an orange poppy
flowering in duality.

In the city, I carry back a love for this wild harmony
as I watch a robin hop across my lawn, pigeons beak at the feeder.
A kite’s stillness on a treetop in the park, 
a garden geometric around a ruin.
This is my cultivated face.
I smile.