I have always been someone who struggles with balance.
As a child, my epic falls, skinned knees, and bruised limbs were woven into the fabric of colorfully descriptive nicknames and persistent family lore. I want to believe that these painful encounters with gravity reflect an all-out, adventurous approach to living, but the truth is that most of my scrapes, sprains, and splinters have occurred during mundane activities when my attention was adrift on a task list, worry, memory, or daydream. At other times, I become so intensely focused that I burn a hole through some project or goal, then find myself trying to mend the singed remnants of what remains. Neither approach is particularly good for getting through a day or a season of living while trying to maintain some degree of balance and upright stability.
"Be calm. God awaits you at the door."
~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Twice a year, the equinox reminds us of the cyclical nature of balance on a grand, planetary scale. We stand for one fleeting moment poised between light and dark as each spin of the earth carves a sliver of light from the northern hemisphere and the south receives the equal and opposite treatment. Outside my own window, the fading of some colors and emergence of others, a soft angle of light, and the slow chirp of crickets prepare me for a season of letting go, slowing down, and turning inward. Another season is beginning half a world away, one of renewal and lengthening and growth. We perceive our journeys as linear, but perhaps they only make sense within the cyclical seasons of light and dark, and a connected web of flawed and beautiful beings simply doing our best to stay upright and dancing.
"And so long as you haven't experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth."
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The past six months have challenged our sense of balance and faith in solid ground. We are afraid to trust our wobbly limbs, unsure we can withstand the earthquakes of our own making. We mourn our personal and collective losses, rage against ignorance, protest injustice. The challenge, perhaps, is to also claim the gifts of the season we are in. We seek our treasure amongst the wreckage: the courage to lift our voices, the insight to recognize our profound connections, and the presence to steady one another when the ground has shifted beneath our feet.
"Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learnanything or anyone that does not bring you aliveis too small for you."
~ David Whyte
These times are not our finest hour; neither are they the end of days. The earth continues spinning wildly on her axis, throwing some of us into darkness and thrusting others into the light. There are gifts in moments of balance, but lessons too in the unsteady extremes. Seasons will change, sorrows will pass, and a deep and radical hope exists in the swirling center of a world that is, by its nature, both changing and changeless.
