Balance

photo by joeball

“It’s a world of abundance,” is how the New-Agers in the nineteen-eighties used to put it as a way of making the somewhat Pollyana-ish, but generally veridical point that the Universe is an awfully big place and usually will provide if only you’re willing to not cling too tightly to what you don’t have and allow nature to grant you all you really need and most of what you really want, as well.

It’s easy enough to become fixated on what’s lacking in our lives—lottery wins, free parking, admirable world leaders—and fail to notice all the treasures we do possess, although drinking beer outside on a vast wooden pier at the foot of a post-modern city overlooking a shimmering bay with shafts of sunlight piercing fluffy clouds like an advertisement for God’s existence tends to make one grateful right from the start of the evening.

All it takes is willingness to put people over principle, an admonition that probably won’t earn me much cred as a tough negotiator but will, I think, allow for a more whole-hearted embrace of options by those faced with another embarrassment of riches in too short a span of time.

That’s the thing you love about a fire pit as opposed to a fire place; the latter forces one to privilege a single perspective; the former, however, enables a full circle of possibilities and conversations.

On the vernal equinox, day and night effect a truce; they recognize that neither exists without the other and that both are merely two side of the same eternal Oneness, where there is no time nor space but all is nameless, changeless, perfection.

Stars seem to rise among the heavens in a single night—but that’s just because we’re spinning; they march across the sky from season to season but only through our movement; on nights like this, the world keeps turning beneath our tires; we simply need to pedal on for dear delicious life.

Trails

photo by joeball

The contemporary philosopher, Cornel West, says of the human condition that we are “featherless two-legged language-aware creatures born between urine and feces who will one day be culinary delicacies for terrestrial worms.”

So there’s that.

But we’re also rollicking two-wheeled fire-imbued rascals pedaling between sewer and waste dump who sometimes opt for the refulgent embrace of supernatural dreams.

Unironically.

We congregate on bricks and rattle past gum walls before rolling over water to tarry by pillars and eventually slither through an enormous yoni-shaped entrance to dirt, mud, and gravel again and again and again and again.

And again and again and again.

It was the first crepuscular start of the year on a day whose dawn broke so resplendently that even rare early-risers got to be awestruck by the heavenly conflagration.

 “Agape” comes in parallel forms: mouth wide open or unconditional love and there were both as we baffled one another by the single-walled fire or looked out over the water by continent’s edge.

I count myself lucky when I get be lost for so long and then suddenly appear at the familiar location; this magic has happened before while trailing behind Joeball but it never fails to delight.

And when you can bomb downhill without have to climb back up afterwards, well, that’s too good to be true.

And yet, so true to be good.

Our merry little blaze walked closer to us all night with a little help from Fancy Fred; the tide fell ever lower until right when we left; all that space between fire and water remained filled with conversation and laughter as the featherless bipeds cavorted with abandon.

And then it was time for a wind-aided gallop towards Chantilly lace and a pretty face and a pony tail hanging down.

A wiggle in the walk and giggle in the talk make the world go ‘round—so much so that you ride west in a circle before east on your usual spin home.