You can live for years next door to a big pine tree, honored to have so venerable a neighbor, even when it sheds needles all over your flowers or wakes you, dropping big cones onto your deck at still of night.

Levertov’s sentence uses a homely, sensory image—living beside a large pine—to describe how reverence and irritation can coexist. The “venerable neighbor” suggests an elder, a tradition, a powerful person, or even nature itself: something worthy of honor simply by its presence and age. Yet the pine’s ordinary inconveniences (needles in flowers, cones thudding at night) insist that what we admire is not domesticated for our comfort. The line quietly argues for a mature kind of respect—one that doesn’t depend on idealization, but accepts the costs and disturbances that come with proximity to what is large, old, and real.