B is for Balance and Beauty

There are cobwebs covering the outside edges of the window over my kitchen sink.

I know they’re there. I see them every time I do the dishes.

Someday, I’ll clean them.

But if I look through them, beyond the glass, I can see the mountains.

Depending on the morning, the valley may be disappearing beneath a blanket of fog, with only the tops of the ridges visible above it. Then the sun begins to rise, slowly burning through the mist, and for a few minutes the whole world outside my not-quite-clean window seems almost magical.

I’ve learned not to miss it because of the cobwebs.

Beauty doesn't require everything around it to be perfect.

Maybe balance doesn’t either.

Beauty isn’t always quiet

Some nights the moon is so bright that the fields seem almost blue beneath it.

Then the coyotes begin to howl.

It is a hauntingly beautiful sound rolling through the valley — right up until you’re lying in bed trying to decide exactly where it came from.

Across the mountain?

Down by the creek?

Near the pasture?

And suddenly appreciating a beautiful Tennessee night becomes calculating distance by the sound of a coyote and wondering whether you should pull on your boots and go check the livestock.

That is another kind of balance I’ve learned here.

The things that make this place wild enough to be beautiful are some of the same things that remind us we are responsible for the animals we’ve brought into it.

Sometimes you simply listen.

Sometimes you get out of bed.

Knowing the difference is part of farm life.

Light through an old barn

I somehow feel a connection to this old barn that is slowly losing its battle with time.

Maybe it’s because I’m becoming more aware of time myself.

The barn isn’t what it once was. Neither am I.

But that doesn’t mean either of us is finished.

There is still life here. There are still things to shelter, stories to hold and mornings when the light finds its way through.

Maybe I’ve been thinking about balance as something we achieve—some magical place where everything is finally caught up, everyone is cared for, nothing needs fixing and there is finally enough time.

I’m beginning to think there is no such place.

Time keeps moving. The barn keeps aging. So do I.

And perhaps the lesson isn’t how to win that battle.

Perhaps it's learning to notice the light while we're still standing.

Boards lean where they once stood straight. Daylight comes through places where daylight was never intended to come through. From a practical standpoint, there are probably a dozen things that could be said about what needs repairing, replacing, bracing or eventually taking down.

But then the sun gets low.

Light streams through every crack and opening in those old boards, catching dust in the air and illuminating the rough construction of people who built things long before we arrived here.

Moonlight does it too.

And suddenly it becomes difficult to see only a falling-down barn.

I wonder about the people who stood inside it before us. The winters it sheltered animals through. The hay stacked here. The tobacco that hung from its rafters. The storms it survived. The conversations nobody remembers anymore.

And the things it witnessed.

Life has come and gone through this barn in more ways than one.

There is something almost overwhelming about standing inside a structure nearing the end of its own life while watching another life begin.

I don’t know that there is a lesson to explain in that. Maybe some things shouldn’t be neatly turned into lessons.

I only know that an old barn can hold both.

Loss in the past and a newborn calf taking its first breath.

Grief and joy separated by years yet somehow occupying nearly the same patch of earth.

Perhaps that is balance in its most difficult form—not equal portions of happiness and sorrow, and certainly not one somehow making the other right.

It is simply the truth that both exist.

The old barn has held beginnings and endings. It has sheltered life, witnessed death, and continued standing while families, animals and seasons passed through it.

And now the sunlight pours through its broken boards.

Those openings are evidence that the barn is disappearing.

They are also what let the light in.

The balance of this life

Living here hasn’t taught me how to create a perfectly beautiful life.

Quite the opposite.

There is nearly always something broken, overgrown, muddy, unfinished or standing somewhere it isn’t supposed to be.

There are fences to fix, fields to mow, animals to feed, weeds that grow faster than we can cut them and approximately 47,000 things more urgent than washing the outside of the kitchen windows.

And somehow, right in the middle of all of it, there are mornings when fog fills the valley.

There are sunsets that stop us in our tracks.

There are moonlit fields and coyotes calling across the hills.

There is sunlight pouring through the boards of an old barn while new life takes its first breath inside.

The cobwebs are real. So are the mountains.

Perhaps balance isn’t finally getting everything finished so that we can enjoy our lives.

Perhaps it is learning to notice the beauty while the work is still waiting.

B is for Balance and Beauty.

The landscape of this life is always changing. Maybe balance is learning to see the beauty in it while we’re still here to see it.