Rebalancing

 A hidden hand sways us from beyond the veil of the unseen. Through the metaphysical purdah insulating our reality from the underlying substrate, we are governed by its secret laws. The ancients grasped the most foundational of these as the Golden Mean, or some variation thereof; the keeper of checks and balances, the taut string of harmonic tension as the self-regulatory backstop of order. When that balance is upset or destroyed, things go haywire.

Reflect: In life, the peak moments of beauty are often cast at the crossroads of opposing polarities or competing tensions. These are the metaphysical zeniths of experience, where nature wells to its crescendoing heights; instances of perfection that are tragically fleeting, and all the more rare, and beautiful, for it.

Take food: some of the world's top chefs insist the choicest delicacies balance on the fragile edge of spoilage and decay — well-aged cheeses, for example. A moment more turns it to rot, a moment less and it is imperfectly unfinished.

Similarly, summer's magical apotheosis in the northern hemisphere lives briefly as the ebbing tide of Solstice has already begun pulling the clock backwards. The days now grow shorter, leaving in their wake the briefly glittering spark of promise, a moment of perfect unity of all the countervailing forces of nature as they rush past each other in opposite directions, briefly overlapping — ephemeral, and all the more precious for it.

So too does life seem to ripen at the nexus where age and youth collide, leaving the purest expression of enjoyment as a transient precarity, hardly to be grasped before it is washed away. We only hit our stride, learning of our make, our likes and dislikes, needs and wants, the beat and crystallization of our confidence and persona, at just the moment when our years begin overtaking us, and the youth for which these consolidations of character would have been the most ready joy-spark of expression is now long in the shadow, robbed forever of its vibrancy.

Nature is fiercely protective of its rarest treasures, in whose penumbra we forever dwell.

It is in this spirit that we cherish all life's ephemeral gifts. The scissures between time and timeliness, created — as if by design — to make us value what had been gotten then lost. The chasm between the 'was' and 'should have been'. To blossom and seize the apex of potential, like an insect gestating for years to explode riotously into form for a brief span, only to die just as quickly...<<<Read More>>>...