Finding Balance

While taking in the world around me this winter season, a colder one than most here in the southeast, I kept finding myself thinking of balance. Initially, during the optimistic weeks surrounding Christmas, I was gifted with a few magical storms that cast just enough snow to blanket the ground in glistening white, hiding recently fallen leaves and detritus of autumn that had turned brown and dry after a kaleidoscope of changing colors. The trees from which they descended, however, remain standing through all seasons, unless overtaken by an unexpected force causing them to split, break or fall. Or, as in the case of Hurricane Helene, be swept away as easily as one of their fallen leaves. This made me also think of grounded-ness and of the nourishment, good will and effort needed to prevent them from falling. I also considered how trees mirror human existence, of how ways we navigate humanity impact their ability to thrive or fail. I know this isn’t a novel contemplation by any means, but it’s one well worth repeating because too few seem to pay enough attention.

If it were the other way around, humanity mirroring trees, the entire planet would undoubtedly be a far gentler, more steadfast place to exist. Trees stay grounded where they take root, and grow over long periods of time without hurry or worry, continually reaching toward light. If one becomes damaged in some natural way, say bugs or weather but not swift human destruction, what remains of it continues nourishing surrounding ones. This connection also allows elder trees to provide sustenance to younger ones still growing and pushing their way through the ground with their roots and toward the sky with their branches. Trees seek space and never try to remain smaller than they’re meant to be, yet at the same time provide shelter and protection to nearby undergrowth. Their roots intertwine with roots of other trees, like holding hands, providing a kind of balance only found in close community with others. If one does fall others continue to gain, often their roots eventually uniting as one. In a way, this is like wisdom and love that continues to pass from people we’ve lost who’ve left the greatest imprint on our lives. Their presence continues both within us and around us in the reminders of them that refuse to let us forget, for though their voices may not echo aloud we can still hear them loud and clear.

I also witnessed balance in how the cold earth provided nesting for seeds and nuts from these trees. As these small jewels lay nestled in a cushion of snow or preserved within ice, life was continuing and preparing for the next season to come. It became so obvious how much growth occurs in unison with death. Before one season has barely begun, already there are preparations for the one that will follow, which also requires remnants from the one passing away. Yes, the circle of life. This is what I try to hold onto now, this always present fine balance between life and death, befores and afters, especially now during our current political season and test of humanity’s ability to survive it. 

The gems I discovered during my walks among the trees and along mountain crests also reminded me of the importance of not only paying attention, but to whom or where we pay it. So often we mindlessly give away our most valuable asset, our attention, and maybe the only one we alone have complete agency over yet never truly know how much of it we have left. Our distractions have become our habits and have overtaken all of our lives, mine included. What impacts one always impacts others. Our hurried lives, which fuel the seemingly never satiated greed of those who benefit most from our lack of awareness, have become so routine that most of us don’t even notice we’re relinquishing the very essence of being alive as our minutes turn into hours, into days, months, years of watching life played out artificially on screens and technology. Now intelligence, too, has become artificial which threatens our innate ability to exercise and strengthen individual thought and discernment.

Currently, there is no balance in humanity because connection has become far too scarce. Not only is no one shaking hands anymore (yes, I know…Covid), but many have become too afraid to even try because there is little memory of a time when this was normal, when looking at a person, talking to a real human being, seeing and feeling seen was what it meant to be alive. Hope lies in the fact that we alone still have agency over where we spend our attention, on something real or not.

The hypocrisy of me making these comments doesn’t escape me so, please, I urge you to skip my website if it doesn’t provide you with some added sense of joy, hopefulness or inspiration. Nourish yourself, and thereby the world around you, by choosing to spend your attention and life doing something that absolutely does.