Balance

140.

An old and intimately familiar feeling greets my transition from sleep. It is one of rejuvenation and hope. I feel like the dust, dirt and grime of a thousand hard miles has been washed away. A guy could get used this this. I recall another passage from my journal, sometimes I’ll open a random page and peruse a sentence or two just to transpose my thinking then as compared to now. Sometimes its like I was older and wiser then as compared to my current understandings now. 

The journal attests that one fine day I was noodling in flow of awareness rapture, the date covered on the page by a dried red substance that could have been wine or blood, but the era was one where the yin/yang ping pong was flipping and flopping about whether it is more important to satisfy one’s soul in the service of others, or simply create art for the sake of joining an advanced plane of experience. The common detonator in this intellectual charade was my observance that whatever one aspires to, one needs to balance it against all challengers. Because the trickster mind will spin anything a thousand ways to Sunday in order to satisfy a preconceived notion of ego. Balance, to me, the person I was twenty or thirty years prior, meant, and here I noticed the reference to the assignment, “describe in five hundred words or less, your idea of a perfect day,” was the first step of a thousand to follow. The practice had already begun, the journey at, maybe, midpoint. As is my way, I wallowed in exposition for four hundred and fifty of the allotted half a thousand words, eventually coming to the conclusion that ‘a perfect day’ needed a balancing of mind, body and spirit. 

One must work the body. 

One must stimulate the mind, and,

One must ponder the miraculous, the magical and the metaphysical. 

You can say all you want about instant gratification, bottom-line profits or blonds in bikinis, but them three is the essence of it. 

I have today. Tomorrow morning at oh-dawn-thirty I will be back on the road to DC and my appointment at Philz Coffee. The one night and one day vacation will be abruptly terminated with the return to the caffeinated spy game. 

I enjoy a leisurely cup of espresso on the deck listening to the morning birds discuss current events with each other. Although not my native tongue I know enough passerine slang to guess that they are both hungry and apprehensive about the new cat in the hood. After the joe I’ll get in a ten mile trail run, clean the cabin, write in my journal, fix the leaky propane line feeding the kitchen and take a nap in my favorite hammock. I need to make a run into town and pick up some pantry supplies and shop for fresh veggies and whatever main entree seems most appropriate for my last night in my temple of peace shack in the woods. Maybe tofu. 

I don’t know if that meets the description of a perfect day or not, but the fact that I don’t care puts it immediately into another category. What makes a day perfect isn’t what IS done, it’s HOW it’s done. 

Of course I am given poor grades by the judges as five miles into my run I am already thinking about the disguise I’ll wear tomorrow during the coffee shop surveillance. 

And then there is that ‘emergency’ meeting with TOM at 1000. 

Whoa! All that will be tomorrow, we are working on perfection today buster. 

With proprioceptors on high alert I feel the low hanging limb a second before I see it and twist a move to avoid a nasty confrontation. I hear a murder of crows in the pine tree cackle with glee at my nimble manoeuvre. 

Balance.