Balance

Have you ever noticed how difficult it can be to get things balanced?

That’s how I feel right now. My life feels unbalanced. Just this morning, I was doing a load of laundry – towels. After the cycle completed, the towels were still soaked. I have a very old washer here and when the load is unbalanced, it just spins slowly without any particular warning. I, of course, have figured this out by now, so I often have to rerun the spin cycle.

The problem today was that no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get the load balanced. I finally took half of the towels out and successfully balanced and spun the first half – then repeated.

During that time, I was doing a reading for myself and the message was clearly about balance. Ask enough times (without really listening) and the message gets loud and clear. So the message is something about balance, but I’m not sure I got the other side.

So let’s just think about balance for a moment. Here is one example of balance:

In the Justice card, Madam Justice is holding scales that are perfectly balanced. Her message is that there is balance whether we see it or not. I guess another way to think about it is this: if you get to a high enough perspective, spanning time and space, you will see how all debts are balanced by Karma.

That’s all fine and good, but unfortunately for those of us trudging through life in time-space reality one moment to the next, we rarely experience it that way. I would say that most of us experience life this way:

Life is a juggle. We juggle needs and wants. We juggle work and play. We juggle making money and spending money. And in order to juggle successfully, we must only hold one or two balls at a time. So the art with juggling is timing. One could say it is also presence. If we’re not focused, we’ll surely drop a ball or two.

So the answer to the 2 of Pentacles is Temperance:

This is another form of balance. Actually, temperance is more about balancing. See the way our angel is pouring some water from one cup to the other? This is to create balance.

I think of Temperance as centering. That is another way of thinking about balance. When I was working on the laundry, I could tell it was out of balance when the agitator started to oscillate away from center. So the goal was to keep the agitator in the center.

Yet, metaphysically, I think the message is more the opposite. With laundry, we have to move clothes around to keep things centered, but in life, maybe we need to work on centering ourselves in order to know how to then move things around. In other words, instead of balancing in order to create centeredness, we want to

use centering to create balance.

Here’s some more visuals for you. This diagram is called Vesica Piscis. It is formed from two equal sized circles where the center of one is placed on the edge of the other and vice versa.

For some reason, this sacred geometry figure has been on my mind a lot lately. In fact, I am right now remembering that it showed up in a dream last night and was related to the Temperance card, which is the card that showed up in my reading today.

Often in life, when we encounter a problem, we cannot see a solution because we don’t look correctly. We might look only at the left side or the right side alternately:

This is the “caught between a rock and a hard place” dilemma. What we need to do instead is see the whole picture with all of its shades of color:

In this way, the overlapping area is highlighted. Within my own situation, I don’t see it yet. I clearly see one circle and I clearly see the other, but the overlap is vague, foggy, and evasive. Even when I imagine the center, I cannot see a way to it. So I guess I’ve been trying to put the cart in front of the horse, to create balance without centering. Now I need to work on centering to create balance.

And here’s one final image for you:

The symbol for Libra, the sign of the scales. Libra, as an archetype, is about bringing balance to a situation. As of Tuesday July 6th, Mars has entered the sign of Libra (after 8 months in Virgo). And, on August 15th, Mars and Saturn will be conjunct in Libra – right in the middle of the month. So, from now until August 23rd, we have two planets in the sign of Libra helping us find balance in our lives. One is about passion and the other responsibility. Mars wants us to take action, and Saturn wants us to act responsibly.

Surely we can find a way to do both, don’t you think?