Balance. . .

—From EF—

I’m hearing the call of the Equinox and wonder what I’ll do this year to let that amazing balance-point echo in my core. I feel it, but don’t yet know what it is. All my life I have been a night-person, but now I see each dawn, taste it, revel in it. I am entranced with the proof of time, the slow clear movement from left to right of the point where the sun makes its entrance on my stage. Our trees mask the clear sight of the horizon, so I don’t get the full picture until I see the daily dawn-photo of a friend who posts his view of the Laguna each morning, but I can guess where the orb is emerging. At summer’s height it’s over by the corner of the garage, and at mid-winter it will be behind the utility pole that impaired drivers whack if they lose control on a Saturday night.

So I’m halfway between the garage and the utility pole. I find myself sensing the beginning of the great letting-go. It’s been painful releasing the lifeline of live stage performance, that voltage that connects performer and audience. Its electricity powered me for sixty years or so, and as I have been doing my memoir-writing I’ve gradually seen the long view, amazed at the shit-load of things I’ve slogged through and survived. The first twenty years were a hard climb to solid ground, the next sixty have been making the equivalent of a logger’s road, and if I live to be a hundred these last twenty will either be the soft sandy ascent to the final vantage-point or the rock-climber’s impossible cliff. When we finally got ourselves back to my beloved California in 2000 and I turned 60, I thought, “Oh yes, now I’m back where I want to be, and the rest will be very sweet.” The Trickster had other plans.

I have allies. My beloved lifemate. Our children, who are making their own logger’s roads. My collard greens and the worms in the dirt. I’m doing better at sensing the exact moment of Now and letting it go deep and long. I still have the company of my lifelong antagonist, the weird wrinkle in my soul that periodically grabs the steering wheel and heads for the ditch, but maybe my task in the time to come is finding how to thank her for what she did to keep me alive in the early years, and suggest that she’s earned her retirement.

That moment of balance is powerful, whether it’s the moment before a sneeze, an orgasm, or the baby’s crowning. Whatever’s next, it will come.

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