The secret

It is rare sense of balance. (Without it, pathos becomes indulgence.) Balance as a kind of creative tension. Like what lies between the love of riddles and the need for answers. Or between what must be spoken though unspeakable -- what must be shared and yet remain unsaid. It is a weighing of wonder with the authority of simplicity. The balancing of continuity with new beginnings, of compassion with restraint, of faith with meekness, of protest with the shock of innocence . . . Like the gentle encounter between light and tears. It is to learn an equation between the action of forgiveness and the sweetness of the motive behind rebuke. Or to touch the antithesis between horizons that stir in you old longings -- between horizons and the familiar faces that demand new affection.

It is to reconcile the quest to discover with the quiet willingness to sacrifice. It is to wed the will to do with the humility to be. It is to have grace. There is no dying anywhere here. It is you alone on the swing being washed by the night rain and singing softly into the clean darkness. It is you dancing at the wave's edge,

or slowly caressing old photographs. It is you in your ageless crossing of the bone-bright years. . . . It is a rare sense of balan ce. Without it, there is no life.