On the night of December 26 I felt psychologically destroyed, as if my very self had died.

It could be that the basis of the fear we feel for the visitors, and — it seems to me — they for us, comes from a biological, instinctive awareness that our coming together nay mean the creation of a third and greater form which will supplant us as the child dues his parents.

The third force is not a small thing: It is the immense progress of life, the very movement of the universe toward whatever goal it seeks. First and second forces are people struggling in a bed. Third force is at once their frantic union and the whole urgency and implication of creation. It is their mutual attraction, the friction of their bodies--and their child.

When the internal triad of mind, body, and heart becomes fixed in a state of permanent harmony, it is because the seeker has finally died to himself and all the allures of life. Out of this death the fourth state emerges. This is the ecstatic objectivity that the Western seeker cherishes, the nirvana of the Hindu, the blooming lotus of Zen.

The human being in a state of spiritual harmony is looked upon as a sort of cosmic egg out of which hatches the bird of resurrection, which is the phoenix, also characterized as an eagle, the symbol of the yin.

In the old imagery of the tarot, and in the gospel story of the Mama Feast at Cana, the feminine is viewed as a cup, the masculine as what is poured into it. The Aztec poets sang of the creative impact of the God and Goddess of Duality, and called the third force the song of the flower.

Distantly as I sit here on the porch at the cabin, I hear the roaring of one of our brooks, swollen by spring melt. The leaves shimmer on the trees, a swarm of Mayflies hovers in the sun. Suddenly two phoebes battle, a scream, a fluff of feathers, and then silence, both birds gone. At some moment, for a reason that seems to me to be as large and enigmatic as the universe itself, the female ceased to resist the male. The duality joined, the triad emerged, new life is now vibrant in her belly.

And both birds are a little older.

Each independent act of creation vibrates the whole web of the world, when the phoebe mates, when a woman takes the pleasure of a man.

It is hard for me to think that the relationship between two intelligent species would not be dense with creative potential.

When we were first married, Anne and I found a motto for ourselves in the Bible, from Ecclesiastes, "Two are better than one... and a cord of three strands is not quickly snapped."