BALANCE

I have just finished a weekend of writing with my Big Yellow Writing Group. We meet twice a year, write and read from Friday night to Sunday at noon. There are 8 to 10 of us, including four singer-songwriters, and on Saturday night, after we write, we sing.
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The following piece is long and if it's too long for you to read, please, no need to be polite about it, I understand. It was hard to write, probably overdue, and perhaps more hopeful than is often the case. Still, I'm glad it's out. xoxo
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Balance

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It might have been a little slice of danger from the start. Whatever is exhilarating is also risky, kind of like riding a roller coaster with your hands above your head and your feet so casually placed they won’t help you brace, especially during that first long wild dip, when your hair flies behind you at lightening speed and you can barely hear your own screams because they are folded into the chill of the collective scream, all the way down, until you level out waiting for the next rapid rise and fall.

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True, there is a steel bar across your lap that holds you to the seat, makes sure gravity will not pick you up and throw you into mid air and sudden death, but let’s face it: you want to ride that roller coaster that way—reckless and reflectively—and you hand over a piece of yourself without knowing the ropes, the same as if you choose a back country trail without provisions or a map, You do it that way and you’re taking your chances that you’ll know what to do when the danger rush comes flying at you, when there’s no time to think and certainly no time to plan.

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You know in general it makes more sense to size things up, take your time and venture slowly, get familiar with what you know and what you don’t. You know It’s better to not be surprised when you are not prepared, to keep the rudder steady, to drop Hansel and Gretel corn kernels behind you so the path stays familiar, but then again when you know your way, you’re not surprised, and when you’re not surprised, you’re not deep in the thrill, and the rush the ride that’s lost to you is not exactly small.
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Isn’t that why sooner or later you’ll come to admire people who just throw their arms up and go with it and venture forth, no map, no plan, no umbrella, no kernels of anything except the wild stallion within them, why you react with amazement when someone decides to let loose, finally, fully, foolishly yes, but who’s to say the benefit will not be the lovely freedom of unleashed passion, newly minted wonder, a way of moving in a sometimes flat world, a level of deciding that transcends and transforms everything that’s come before it? Don’t most of us envy people like that, wish we could do it that way too, at least sometimes? Don’t you want the earth to move, the foundation to shake, the stars to explode right in front of you, to throw you off your feet and in high into the air in one explosive bolt? Really now, don’t you?
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I knew a woman who traded in her compass and her raincoat for the thrill of the open road. She burned her house down and everything in it one October morning and she never looked back. When she ventured forth, she was anchorless, weightless, unencumbered, clueless, totally wide and open and fresh and full. It was like her had heart split down the middle, pulsating with a raw recklessness, spilling forth deep love everywhere, no fences, no ambivalence, no back doors, not a molecule of second guessing. She slid onto that roller coaster seat and for two years she rode up the track and down, letting an unfamiliar and totally exhilarating passion slap her face, toss her from side to side, spike her right off her seat. Treasured moments, vibrant images, new possibilities flew by her with lightening speed, new colors and new words and new ways previously unknown to her.
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She lived that way for two years. She cared deeply and loved foolishly and picked up a palette knife and painted amazing faces and landscapes and emotions, mostly in the caladium reds and brilliant oranges and an occasional tempering blue. She made love at least once a day, losing and finding herself in the ecstasy of her muffled screams and unbridled lust, savoring the sweat that trickled onto to her breasts in the smallest molecules, she lying there having been taken and expelled and depleted all at once.
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One roller coaster dip after another, thunderous conditions that told her she was alive, ready to be taken and expelled and depleted again, and then again. She was free, a wild stallion without fences, finding her way to the top of the terrace, looking down on small pebbles and unsure footing that caused her no trouble.
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It’s hard to know what happened next. The change was imperceptible, like that story of the sleepy frog in tepid water, who does not notice the temperature is rising until the boiling point is reached and all options of the frog’s escape are gone.

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It might have been a brilliant day in early May, or perhaps a heavy rain in late August, but one day she was simply no longer herself. Her heart was still split open alright, a straight incision so wide and so clean she had failed to notice how much of herself had slipped away. She looked for a familiar fence in the distance, wanting to confirm the boundaries of her territory. She walked along the woody path she had traveled since childhood, shocked at the erosion of its sturdy riverbanks, dismayed that the steady current had over spilled on what was once dry and fervent land. She still rode the wild rollercoaster, but the lifts and spikes now exhausted her, no longer satisfying her reckless hunger, and instead blurring her vision, knocking her into a crazy dizzy confusion where the quest for passion had heightened her hunger to an unsustainable level. She had lost herself when she thought she’d been found. .
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Did you know this could happen? Have you already learned that fences sometimes protect, not just restrict? That passion sometimes overtakes, not just exhilarates? Do you know that hearts can roam free and wild for only so long, before they need to slow down, level out, open up and wide, yes, but did you know that hearts prefer the a clean cut that expands instead of explosives that blast? Because when your heart explodes, dozens of shards blow and fall everywhere, and you may spend years picking the blown apart pieces, trying to put them back together rightly.

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That is what happened to this woman I knew. It took her a long time to stop running around looking to find and repair all those pieces. It took her a long time to learn about balance and safety and steady sails. But she did learn. Every once in a while she is back on that roller coaster, whoopy-ing her way through a wild arms-in-the-air ride, letting the wind take her again, leaving her umbrella and compass in a back room somewhere.
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But still, she has a back pocket now. And in it she has the smallest folded map, just in case, that shows her the way home, just in case. There are still nights she screams in wild passion, risks it all with gleeful abandon, but that little map in her back pocket: well, let’s just say she knows her way.