prelude—
I’ve been told there is a genesis poem, a poem igniting the poet within. I don’t know if this is a real thing. I have stayed breathing, been brought back to life, and have been pressed to create my own combination of words because of
so many writers within so many mediums.
However, there does happen to be a poem, a poem perennially inside me, which continues to bring balmic light to mine and all my observed, conflicted existence— this is Robert Frost’s “Birches”— the boy who swings toward heaven from a birch tree until the tree can’t bear any more and then is set back down again.
“That would be good both going and coming back,”
He writes.
This swinging pendulum of back and forth
from the infinite to the finite, is our mortality.
While “one eye is weeping,”
we have an other eye rejoicing.
Frost’s now axiomatic wisdom has filled me with the comfort that we are reliably nestled within our world of binary systems, the reality of all things existing in a single body of opposition, all things compound into one— light & dark, peace & war, joy & pain, courage & fear, life & death, faith & doubt, tension & rest, complete & incomplete.
Our reactionary mind sees these polarities as contradictory, but the interactions occurring somewhere between the polemical ends, ignite heat— these dualities beget creation. This push and pull, back and forth, both going and coming back, all happening within the dyad,
is where I find life— in continuum.
Here we are, a heap on the tray of viable existence which resides atop an earthly fulcrum, and we are learning to adeptly stable ourselves, leveling our position, centering ourselves amidst the pull of opposing sides. But maybe we can relax a bit, breathe easy and breathe full, knowing we are right where we are supposed to be—
in the balance of a bounded bloc of necessary counterparts,
our life, our planet, our experience, our land in two’s.
As the swinger of birches himself proclaims,
“Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”
I can’t seem to get away from writing about this reality of duality. And if you choose to read further, my hope is you will feel more comfort, rather than discomfort, within this balance.
