Balance

When I begin to think about balance, early images from childhood come to mind … I think about each of us struggles to balance ourselves in space … first figuring out how to balance our heads on the rest of our body … then, in time, experimenting with how to balance ourselves on our seats and later on our feet … if our bodies are able to be upright, we intuit and experiment with balance until most of us are able to sit, stand and walk in an environment where the forces of gravity work against that uprightness … holding us to the earth’s surface.

Many of us as children even figure out how to do it on one foot when we learn to hop … with some coaching and a few bloody knees and elbows, we figure out how to balance our body on two wheels when we learn to ride a bike … we discover that it gets easier if we keep moving … and the faster we go the less we have to concentrate on the feat of staying balanced … some even figure how to do it on one wheel and can ride a unicycle … some discover how to balance our bodies on two thin blades as we learn to skate …

We grow to admire the beauty we witness in extraordinary acts of balance … in athletics, in the practice of yoga, tai chi, chi gong … in gymnastics, ballet, figure skating … we celebrate those who master acts of balance in the most exceptional ways. But without much conscious thought, so much of our embodied life relies on bones and muscles having strength and capacity to balance our bodies in our atmospheric environment.

We often come to take balance for granted until something compromises our equilibrium, our affects our mobility. And we speak of balance in other respects too … in other dimensions of life … in addition to the very physical act of keeping our balance … we hear a lot about eating a balanced diet … managing a balanced budget … achieving balance in our home and work life … maintaining the balance of nature or holding the balance of power.  It leads me to think that balance isn’t a skill we just unconsciously master as children and however we are abled in our bodies but it is a practice we have to work at our whole lives. And one of our best teachers is the universe itself.

Science is helping us remember that we are here because of the extraordinary balance that birthed our planet and created the possibilities for life to emerge  … we are products of a universe that expanded not to quickly and not too slowly.

Science and poetry are reminding us of our goldilocks position in our galaxy … we are here because of a planet that is not too hot and not too cold … not too solid and not too liquid … because it is just the right distance from our life giving star to create the conditions for living cells to evolve … to be in just the right relationship with our life giving star … that is

… where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –

We are here in the great balance of earth’s reliable revolutions around its sun, its dependable orbit in space and the pattern of its turning on its own axis … a world conceived and birthed by the rhythm of the universe …. of stars emerging, shining and dying, of cells growing, dividing and finding patterns of increasing complexity, of water and land having some necessary arrangement between them.

And one of the great creation myths of our tradition reminds us we are in here in the midst of the great balance of light and darkness, earth and sky, land and sea and the diversity of creatures with whom we live.

Once upon a time, there was a displaced people but now their songs had fallen silent … their temple was gone … their rituals were all but forgotten … all the familiar landmarks had been erased  … the prayers they had learned from their parents were a foreign language to their children … they had lost everything that made them who they were … they found themselves miles from home, in a terrain that wasn’t home, amid a people who spoke a language that wasn’t their mother’s tongue, amid a people whose traditions were completely different from theirs … whose gods had different names than theirs … whose sense of the sacred was different than theirs … they had lost their equilibrium … they sought some kind of order in the midst of their chaos …

and this ancient people gave us an enduring song … a piece of wisdom about rhythm and balance … in a dark time, there was the dream of light emerging out of darkness … in a chaotic culture, there was the dream of terra firma emerging from the sea and the sky … of life stirring from impossibility … and it was all good … that’s the chorus that comes after every verse … let there be … and there was … and it was good …

The very form of speech in this text teaches its wisdom … even after centuries of translation the rhythm of these phrases tell us we are hearing music … the music of the soul in poetry or song … we are hearing the longings of a disoriented people  … an ancient people who could no longer find the rhythm that had infused their lives with meaning … they could no longer move their feet to dance because they couldn’t hear the beat of purpose … they could no longer give voice to their song because they had lost the tune …

This rhythmic repetition comes down to us from a homesick remnant of faithful Jews who had been displaced from Jerusalem and other parts of Judea when the Babylonians (modern day Iran) had conquered their country more than 2500 years ago now.  It is an old but timeless song.

Their song was a way of singing the long story of becoming … of life balancing and rebalancing itself … of disorientation and reorientation … of extinctions and emergence … of the essential relationships in the web of life … the essential relationship between day and night, light and darkness, earth and sky, land and water, and the creatures of earth, sky and sea …  of recovering the essential and implicit rhythm, of restoring the balance inherent in the universe and finding goodness to be the underlying force of life which inspires identity and infuses meaning.

Like this ancient people, we are too know harmony and dissonance … order and chaos … balance and disequilibrium … perhaps we are learning that our need for balance is not so much about doing more of this and less of that … of the teetor … of tinkering with where we place the fulcrum … but rather it is about placing ourselves in right relationship with what is … just like we had to find right relationship with our seat and feet …

We celebrate a ritual like baptism … honoring the relationship we have with the primal element of water … and the essential elements of love and nurture … and the community of life into which we welcome our children… and knowing our responsibility to feed their bodies and minds and spirits … we enact this ritual to rooting ourselves in the balance of being … to remember that life depends on being in right relation with our planet, our culture, our community, ourselves.

We know only too well the disequilibrium and chaos of not being in right relationship … the dizziness of acquiring more overriding the rhythm of being more … the tilt toward production eroding the rhythm of balance between work and play, labour and rest, thinking and dreaming, acting and reflecting, doing and being … the chaos of exploiting the resources of land and sea undermining the rhythm of tides, the balance of beings, the cycles of harvest and fallow … the chaos of empty and endless social connecting confusing the rhythm of our need for solitude and community … Today is a day to consider how we keep our balance … what do we need to renew to live in right relationship … to give our attention to feed our bodies, our minds and our spirits … to honor the delicate balance that makes life possible … and to strive not for perfection … but just for the wiggle wobble of balance.

-Nancy Steeves