Balance

EVERYDAY BALLET 

 A few years ago, after Delycia and I had seen a stunning performance by the Boston Ballet, I got to thinking, as we rode home on the train, that beautiful ballets are continuously being danced all around us. It’s strange that I so often miss this marvelous fact – that perfectly balanced dance-like harmonies of the highest order are everywhere, always. Closest to home, there’s the graceful symmetry of our bodies – our balanced limbs and organs, as well as the flawless steadiness of the passing of blood through our veins and arteries. There’s the graceful twirl of tree limbs in winds, the spins that sparrows show off as they search for food, and the stylish skips and leaps of squirrels. Even the slow fall of old blossoms to the grass seems to be done with poise and precision, as we saw on that day in Boston, where floating white dogwood petals pirouetted in the air around us as we walked through a park after the performance.

And what about these immense stones we saw in a walk this morning in Oswegatchie Hills Nature Preserve in Niantic?

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

They seem so beautifully and effortlessly balanced, as they have been for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, just silently doing a motionless ballet of boulders, day after patient day, eon after unwavering eon .

Yes, ballet at the theater is a blessing, but no more so than the skillful dancing of our everyday world. 

And here’s my favorite dancer, balanced and silent in her stylish way.

• 

• 

+ + + + +

BALANCING POWER

(Jimmy Lee H., 38, Blessings, CT)
 
He loves the thought 
of the balance of power,
and he sees this everlasting balance 
making peace in his life, 
little by little and day by day. 
He likes to celebrate goodness 
as a way of balancing   
the media’s bowing down to bad news,
and when big danger demands his fear, 
he puts big trust on the scale 
and all is balanced and peaceful.