From the Winter 2001 issue of Barrow Street:
Balance
by Jane Hirshfield
by Jane Hirshfield
Balance is noticed most when almost failed of-
in an elephant’s delicate wavering
on her circus stool, for instance,
or that moment
when a ladder starts to tip but steadies back.
There are, too, its mysterious departures.
Hours after the dishes are washed and stacked,
a metal bowl clangs to the floor,
the weight of drying water all that altered;
a painting vertical for years
one morning-why?- requires a restoring tap.
You have felt it disappearing
from your own capricious heart-
a restlessness enters, the smallest leaning begins.
Already then inevitable,
the full collision,
the life you will describe afterwards always as “after.”
There is something to this, this noticing of balance when you don’t have it anymore, like the old blues song “You don’t miss your water ’til your well runs dry.” If we want to achieve and sustain balance in our lives, communities and organizations then, I think it’s not a bad idea to engage in the practice of noticing it when you have it, rather than trying to identify it when it is about to collapse. At that point (a tipping point?), as the elephant is falling off the stool, or the dish is crashing to the floor, you are reacting to losing something you were only slightly aware that you had. The crises mode is exactly NOT the state you want to be in to contemplate balance again.
This kind of proactive mode of inquiry can extend to many other areas of life too. Peace? Do we have peace right now? What does it look like? Success? Stability? Happiness? Noting these thing now means that when they start to slip, you can remember what they were so that as you cruise and surf on the changes, you have an idea of where you might want to go.
Thanks to riley dog for the link.
Genevieve Bergeron
Nathalie Croteau
Anne-Marie Edward
Maryse Laganiere
Anne-Marie Lemay
Michele Richard
Annie Turcotte
Helene Colgan
Barbara Daigneault
Maud Haviernick
Maryse LeClair
Sonia Pelletier
Annie St-Arneault
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz
The New York Morning News correspondant Rosecrans Baldwin chooses his own assignment: walk the length of Manhattan.
He starts out at 5am and in the course of walking the 13.5 miles of the island’s length he seizes upon a moment where even in a huge metropolis, the city can belong to the citizen:
Sometime in the early morning, just before Central Park, I called my wife because I was simply too happy to contain myself. I had to tell her something, but I couldn�t put it into words. Perhaps I had never been so alive. New York can be like that � once in a while the city slows down and becomes ours, we look up, we see ourselves as a part of something very fine and rare, green and black, slowly growing. Not I am, but there it is. That New York exists is a miracle, and for its citizens, the city offers as good a shot at transcendence as any forest or cathedral. The awareness of being part of something more sublime � this crumbling, singing city, and all our lives crumbling and singing too � somehow walking the island�s body before people are on the streets makes the chance to have that feeling much greater. It�s a fleeting moment, only two seconds long, but it�s there.
Thanks to portage for the link
“Years ago in Vietnam, people used to take a small boat out into a lotus pond and put some tea leaves into an open lotus flower. The flower would close in the evening and perfume the tea during the night. In the early morning, when the dew was still on the leaves, you would return with your friends to collect the tea. On your boat was everything you needed: fresh water, a stove to heat it, teacups and a teapot. Then, in the beautiful light of the morning, you prepared tea right there, enjoying the whole morning drinking tea on the lotus pond.”
— Thich Nhat Hahn, Creating True Peace, p. 67-68
There is something very important about having a practice like this that both expands time and connects one to the land. I do something like this around here on Bowen Island, off the west coast of Canada, where my kids and I head out to the beach or into the forest to walk and eat from the land: seaweed or berries or fern roots.
But what can compare with drinking tea perfumed by a lotus flower?