Equanimity in Times of Imbalance

As I move through these different days differently, I hear words like eerie, anxious, stressful. I observe my own feelings of imbalance and uncertainty. My prayer life seems to be offering words like new, change, opportunity, restoration and equanimity. It is this last word which is new to me. It seems to resonate with my quest for compassion and contemplation not to mention to satisfy my endless curiosity for the creative. It stimulates my imagination. 

And so imagine my surprise when I came across this paragraph in my readings for next Sunday and generally for recognizing the opportunities in this time of stress and imbalance: 

Wallace Stevens says: 

Music which falls on the silence like a sense 

A passion that we feel, not understand. 

Morning and afternoon are clasped together 

And North and South are an intrinsic couple 

And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers 

That walk away as one in the greenest body. 

In this vivid moment of insight, indeed of what he calls "the particulars of rapture," Stevens weaves a varied tassel of metaphors, one reminiscent of the mystics' notion of a "coincidence of opposites." Stevens presses us to imagine - to "feel" in the depth of our being - how it is that "two things of opposite natures seem to depend/On one another." His genius comes when he points to this mingling of contrasts, even opposites as "the origin of change," suggesting that only when we come to see how "Two things of opposite natures seem to depend/On one another" can we find our way toward a sense of Equanimity (my emphasis) within the unstable circumstance we often face. " (Mark Burrows) 

Big/Small, male /female, introvert/extrovert (ambivert),young/elderly, abled/disabled... it seems to me we are at this critical time to realize the value of the "coincidence of opposites". We often get stuck on one or the other side of the dyad and it becomes too big, too frightening, too limiting...In times such as these we might want to intentionally get very very still and simply listen. It is often in that time we see opportunity in challenge and feel the Body of Christ assisting us in our own becoming and living into our fullest incarnation. 

As Etty Hillesum said in her letters of the struggle against the Nazi injustices: "Reestablish contact with a slice of eternity" and she did so by Listening. 

Listen for the still small voice; turn toward the light which is always there...somewhere; rest in the arms of the God who loves you no matter what... 

Blessings, 

M