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.