{ the beauty of imbalance }

no photo for you today, sorry,
i spent a few minutes searching and then i thought,
if nothing inspires your eyes, why look so hard?
and then i chastised myself for my laziness,
and then i told myself to just shut up and write.

thus, we begin.

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as the years go by, certain things rise with a startling clarity and other things become obscured until they, or rather, the importance of understanding them completely, fades. this sharpening and loosening of vision doesn't always happen proportionately (one thing revealed while the other thing disappears) --- in fact, it almost never does. so the shimmering scales on this mermaid tail of a human life do what they do --- they glimmer, one catches the light, one falls away. a radiance, an epiphany, a loss.

and we swim on.

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i am one of those annoying people who would prefer that as something falls from my left hand, something else falls into my right. i prefer what i believe my soul recognizes as not just balance, but fairness. it's a tough way to be, because life isn't fair. but i'm learning that while sometimes it feels like life takes and takes and takes some more (and that's not fair), sometimes life gives. and gives. and gives, when you least expect it. sometimes you're weathering what feels like a crushing, fatal taking, and a very small gift appears. the size of this gift may be nothing in comparison to the taking, but somehow it fills the space. and that's not proportionate or rational, but it can happen, it has happened. and it will happen.

everything returns

even more magnificently

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one must never despair upon losing something, whether it is an individual or an experience of joy or happiness; everything returns even more magnificently. what has to decline, declines; what belongs to us, stays with us, for everything works according to laws that are greater than our capacity for understanding and that only seem to contradict us. you have to live within yourself and think of all of life, all of its millions of possibilities, openings, and futures in relation to which there exists nothing that is past or has been lost.

{ rilke }