Outside my bedroom, to the right of our humble house, is an ornamental apple tree that marks the seasons. It is the first to offer buds and burst into pale white flowers, and the first to show signs of autumnal blush in copppers, reds and golds, carpeting the path with it's resplendance. It's a very still time of year - the summer winds have calmed and the winter ones have yet to gather. The mornings are bright and cold, and the day ripens into blue skies and sunshine, a kind of late summer where you are painfully aware that the firewood needs to come in. As the apples, pears and quinces give up their bounty, on the other side of the world, the primroses and nettles and haw buds begin their show. This time last year I was in England, in awe of Spring, but missing the Australian Autumn. I don't know which one I'd choose, if it came to that. Both are stunning in their own way. The changeover of the seasons can be both bittersweet and thrilling - the prospect of change is in the air, sometimes tainted with that we have to let go. But if there is one constant in our lives, it's nature reminding us that nothing can be held, or lasts forever. Nothing gold can stay, just as the cracked seeds in the dark earth do not stay in the underlands for long, but push up to meet the sky.
Such duality in nature feels right - it's part of the ebb and flow and rhythm of our existance. To deny this essential truth causes feelings of gripping, of holding on to what cannot be held. It turns up as grief, as frustration, as anger, as depression. What we resist, persists, goes the cliche. A denial of the inevitability of death creates an ongoing fear of it. An avoidance of stressful situations can lead to a reduced opportunity to achieve what one wants. A memory hidden and supressed always turns up in other ways.
In a world where we're taught to focus on the positive, to 'be happy' and 'be kind' and 'just breath' and 'be generous' and 'be good' and 'love thy neighbour' and 'don't sweat the small stuff', what happens when our lives are the opposite of these ideals? What happens when I hold my breath and hold on to that which I should let go, wish ill for a neighbour, stress about the little things and tighten my purse strings when charity knocks? What happens if I'm not feeling positive, or generous, or loving, or kind?
Summer sunset, Australia
It's all very well and good to say we don't need the 'bad' stuff - the 'evil', if you will - and to choose 'good', but we do live in a dualistic world, and it is our responsibility to embrace this life, suffer it's joys and it's sadness both. Night and day, winter and spring, cold and hot, moon and sun, love and hate, life and death. Aren't all the parts of our life experience valid, here to teach us, to guide us? Aren't our shadows, because they exist, worth attending to, acknowledging or loving in the same way we love the light?
Perhaps it's just how we respond. A kind of equanimity.
A little less being caught up in the drama of it all. A little less excessive complaining, ruminating, obsessing, story telling.
A little less resistance, and more an appreciation and acceptance of this moment to moment experience, no matter what form it takes, with an ultimate goal of transcendance.
Buttercups in an English spring
Maybe this is how we find balance - to know that things are balanced, just the way they are, in the ebb and flow of our lives. It's just the attention we give things. Too much passion or too much indifference is never a good thing. Ask Romeo and Juliet about their professions of love for each other and how that ended. Love moderately, right? It's a beautiful thing to love - holy, even. But to not practice equanimity can come at great cost.
When I learnt my father might die, my heart hurt - not in a metaphoric way, but a painful, chest crushing way. The story of his death became the story of my own identity and where I was in the world. I imagined the end of love. I imagined myself unmoored. I wonder how terrible that would have been had I not had a few years of wisdom behind me, where I had learn that pain, and loss, and grief and change were as much a part of life as love, and belonging, and connection to all things. I sat with the pain in my heart and felt love at teh same time, two things co-existing. It can be like that with the most dreary daily experiences - the busy day is also one where you can find moments of not busy - the meditation time before bed, the drive to work, the moments staring at the blue sky. It's all where you put your focus.
This is easy to say now, in this writing, but to be honest, I feel a strong sense of imbalance in my life now. There is too much work, and not enough play. There's too much giving, and not enough recieving. There's too much of one thing and not another. But I tell myself that's just the story I'm caught up in, and watch the drama I make of it my head lest it become stronger when I articulate it. Focus on one side of things, and that's what it will be.
And then of course, through the practice of attention, and presence - the holiest of the holys - in flow, the sudden balance of all things, the rush of oneness:
There is a current of love-energy that flows
Between Earth below and the Sun above.
The central channel of your spine
is the riverbed.
The streaming is as delicate and powerful
As the tingling touch of lovers.
Entering here,
Radiance arches between above and below.
The whole attention resting in the nerve,
Vibrating in the center of the
spinal column,
Tracing this current between
Earth and Sun,
Become magnetism
relating all the worlds.
Lorin Roche - The Radiance Sutras
Perhaps balance isn't one side or the other, or having them both equally present in our lives, or denying the existance of one thing in the hope the other becomes the ultimate reality. It's acceptance of the ebb and flow, the push and pull, the shadow and light, and how they arise in our experience and fall away, to be replaced by something else, and the divine moments where earth and sky, sun and moon, above and below, merge into a perfect, luminous moment of divinity.
This is one response to the theme of 'balance', a challenge hosted by 
With Love,