balance

To make the world. To make it again and again. To make it in the very maelstrom of its undoing.

Once a woman put her hand in a gate and it ate her fingers. A five-legged spider with red eyes crawled out. That woman put in three fingers from her other hand, so that the spider might be complete. Do you have that integrity of purpose, sister?

No great thing comes without a curse.

Where was the line between compassion and foolishness, kindness and weakness? And that was from her position. From theirs, it might be a line between mercy and cruelty, consideration and callousness.

When scientists underestimate complexity, they fall prey to the perils of unintended consequences. The parables of such scientific overreach are well-known: foreign animals, introduced to control pests, become pests in their own right; the raising of smokestacks, meant to alleviate urban pollution, releases particulate effluents higher in the air and exacerbates pollution; stimulating blood formation, meant to prevent heart attacks, thickens the blood and results in an increased risk of blood clots in the heart. But when nonscientists overestimate [italicized, sic] complexity- 'No one can possibly crack this [italicized, sic] code" - they fall into the trap of unanticipated consequences. In the early 1950s , a common trope among some biologists was that the genetic code would be so context dependent- so utterly determined by a particular cell in a particular organism and so horribly convoluted- that deciphering it would be impossible. The truth turned out to be quite the opposite: just one molecule carries the code, and just one code pervades the biological world. If we know the code, we can intentionally alter it in organisms, and ultimately in humans. Similarly, in the 1960s, many doubted that gene-cloning technologies could so easily shuttle genes between species. by 1980, making a mammalian protein in a bacterial cell, or a bacterial protein in a mammalian cell, was not just feasible, it was in Berg's words, rather "ridiculously simple." Species were specious. "Being natural" was often "just a pose.

the secret of survival was to balance hope and despair

We must remember balance and moderation. Patience can be spiritually enriching and virtuous_ but when taken in excess, it turns to procrastination, the poison of inaction.

Harmony is our natural state of being, and so, when our energies become too stagnant, chaos is thrown into the mix to stimulate what will eventually result in balance and invite flow. The trick is to not let chaos trap or define you_ simply allow it to create movement in the vehicle of your life so that you can snap your eyes open and take back control of the wheel. Do not lose yourself in the storm, instead, be the calm in the storm.

I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.

As darkness falls and sleep pulls at me, I wonder, not for the first time, about life and death. Both are real and neither would exist without the other. They balance each other, as do night and day. Hot and cold. Summer and winter.Some people struggle with this concept. At times, they even forget all about it. But if you remember just one thing, let it be this: life always balances itself out. For every bad guy out there, there is someone equally good to make things right again.

Love does not dwell on how much one receives in return. If there is ever any balance in love, it is in a contest of who can love who more.

Half of what we do depends on how smart we are, the other half depends upon how we do it

There is no work-life balance. We have one life. What's most important is that you be awake for it.

Sometimes nothing is the best thing to say and often the best thing to do.

I find that often simple words say all that needs to be said in less time, using less energy, with all the details wanted- fully in tact. Love it.

I don__ need anyone else to distract me from myself anymore, like I always thought I would.

The Bird of Paradise, it seemed, had beckoned us on and led us in, to stand here in this place high in the land of volcanoes. It was here in Bali, after returning from the Toraja Star Children, that I first recognized what they meant by us all being born half of heaven and half of earth. And after the mounted warsports of Sumba it was in Balinese ritual that I saw with new eyes the battle for balance between light and darkness. And after Borneo, returning to the sacred Banyan tree and its simian custodians, I had felt that all great trees, what__ left of them, do indeed link heaven and earth in a single forest of life.

Words to invoke peace & awareness. Words to create freedom and fairness. Words to plant sacred seeds. and sing us back into balance.