Balance and Spaces

The worship sharing I sat in asked us queries about our relationships: family, friends, work, community, nature, self, spirit, etc.  and if our relationships were in balance.  As friends shared it became apparent that balance wax and wanes in life with both predictable and unpredictable events: the birth of triplets, the loss of a job, a sudden health situation, changes for others in our life.  Some events allow us to grow in areas of our lives, others complicate things.  We ebb and we flow.

Later one man spoke of the role of grief in our process and spoke about grieving for some trees lost out of his yard after a storm.  I thought of trees that were cut out the 2nd Growth grove of trees around my Meeting when we did our remodel and also one big one that just fell in a windstorm.  The man commented that when trees leave they leave a space for light to come through.  That I thought was an interesting way to think about it.  At our Meeting when the tree fell some member asked if the "other trees had noticed" (and in fact grove trees our connected by their roots.  The sense then was of a space left that was grieved by the other trees, but now his comment suggested to me that with a new space, a place for light to come what also is now possible? 

I realized there are always little seedlings working year by year on becoming bigger trees, but we tend to ignore them because they seem so small and relatively insignificant compared to the bigger trees.  I realized though with more light they would grow more quickly.   We would notice the loss of the big trees and worry that there were "less" and "cannot be replaced", have a scarcity thought.  But in fact their replacement is already on its way and in the seasons of the woods there are always big trees and medium trees and small trees - in balance (unless messed with by humans.)   This Quarterly the adults were all pleased that half our attenders were children.  Long I have worried about the big gap of Quakers in their 40's, but somehow despite this....the children are now coming.  The promise of possibility is always there.

And so in our lives also where things maybe off balance and we cannot anticipate the next thing, the next change or the next possibility or the next lost.  Somehow it all does flow exactly as it needs to.