Balance is something so many of us strive for-- we talk about ‘work-life balance’ or a balanced diet or balancing the budget. We try to find that place where all things come to rest, where all the ends meet and there is nothing lacking, nothing superfluous. A place of moderation, of poise, where struggle ends and we simply land on our toes, and are suspended, as if in thin air. Many of us strive for this place of balance and call that perfection.

                But that moment is brief and elusive, because that balance is an illusion.  The moment passes and things are no longer in balance, things no longer hang perfectly between one extreme and the other. IT evaporates so fast as we tip, towards one side or the other, back towards one extreme or the other. At the Spring Equinox, night and day are of equal length. For one brief moment, it is said that one can stand an egg on one end and it will stay there perfectly balanced…for a moment.  We stand with one foot in the Winter that’s ending, and one foot in the Spring that’s blossoming in front of our eyes. And whatever late season storm may come, every moment in Spring beings us farther away from balance, farther away from that moment of repose before big changes come.

                Finding balance, elusive as it is, compels us to being discerning about our values: what benefit is worth what cost, what are we willing to invest in anything—projects, people, identities—in order to derive what reward. That balance will shift over the course of our lifetime. It will shift through our own personal evolution, as well as through circumstances we cannot control. But our truest values run through all our changes, a ley line, a compass to guide us to the next course correction and the next.

                When I began writing this essay, days ago, my apple trees were white with blossoms. Two days of driving wind and rain later, almost every petal is on the ground, the scent of the apple blossom is suddenly dimmer than it was. It’s always a brief moment, the moment of the apple blossoms, and if I miss there’s no catching back up with it. But the setting of the fruit, the eventual dropping of leaves next fall, the trimming of its branches in the cold next Winter—those are all moments too, which the trees and I have shared many times, and will again, in their time.

                I always feel a pang when the last of the apple blossoms disappears. I love when trees bloom; it reminds me to get outside and out of my head and into the awakening world. By the time the last petal falls I can see Summer on the horizon. It reminds me to seize every opportunity to breathe and feel the joy this beautiful world offers up to us, every day.