A Terrific Balance

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I hold a great fear that real intimacy is nothing more than a quiet acceptance of small shared moments that fill the heart with their simple immensity. I defer to the adage that true happiness only comes when you can see the extraordinary in the ordinary. 

I’ve been looking for meaning in earthquakes, thunderstorms, great waves rising out of storm driven seas. I want to be filled to the brim with excitement, with so much joy that it threatens to carry me skyward by the sheer lightness of self it will bring to me. I want to feel something so passionate that it obliterates pain and sadness.  Flannery O’Connor writes, “Looking back I have suffered not my share, but enough to call it that…there’s a terrific balance due.” I’ve been looking for the terrific balance due and am honestly bereft at the idea that it may not look or feel like anything I’ve been grasping for all this while. 

What if this quiet is not enough? There are moments I want to burn the world down just to feel the heat. How does quiet simplicity satiate such a hunger? Where is the edge between treasuring the small warmth of moments that come and go and reaching for the stars blazing across the cosmos? Do I dare to disturb the universe, to eat a peach? Or, do I simply measure my life in coffee spoons? 

Or, perhaps, grudgingly, I may arrive at a moment when I understand that a heart can be filled without fury or great tempests, but rather in the calm that comes after the storm: the smell of sage wafting through the air, the scent of liquorice, a call to a meadowlark answered and the welling up of just enough joy to feel the beauty of it all as the clouds drift across the sky.