Dichotomy

The world can always be divided. Night and day. Sky and land. Sick and well. We live among opposites. It is also said that we exist on a continuum running between these opposites. We are sliding a little closer to sadder, or fatter, or richer, and then we perhaps slide back the other direction. As if we are swinging on a pendulum.

I have a different view. I think the world is divided more into immovable poles on each end of an axis; our earth moves in accordance to the pole on which we are positioned. We turn with the sun and tides in one position and then with them in reverse according to the tilt of our world. Our lives are so much dictated by the position we have, on one pole or the opposite, that our perception of the world cannot help but to follow that path.

I visited two places this morning. I first took my son Ethan to the doctor. He is one, and is just beginning to wrap his little mind around words and their meanings, of gestures of affection and protest, of movement. He looks at me with his clear, ageless blue eyes and I am mesmerized by his utter embodiment of youth and child.

Ethan and I then went to the nearby hospital and visited by grandmother. I work in a healthcare setting, so sick people shouldn't affect me, but today it did. For some reason, the stark transition from youth to individuals sailing into the dusk of their lives caught me off guard. When I entered my grandmother's room, my brother and mother were there, standing around her bed in an all-to-small space. As I have said before, my grandmother was a beautiful woman, and she still is. She has dark wavy hair that doesn't even have a hint of gray. Her eyes are still a milky brown. But she is tired. Her cells have reached up and out, until they have no place else to go except down again. She is entering the place of forgetting instead of remembering, and her movements have become small. My mother held Ethan and made happy chatter, because my mom is good at that, at putting people at ease, but I could not help but to notice the polar opposites in the room.

Opposites exist together, mingling like smoke and light. You can be experiencing an inexpressible sadness, and you walk outside your door and hear laughter somewhere. Or it could be raining, with the sun still blazing in the sky. Your perception of the world is truly dictated by the tilt of your axis, but you are just one small world revolving in a chaotic system of other people and their worlds. Somehow it all equals out. It balances.

The sun is gone now, leaving behind its black sky, but somewhere the sun is rising. Someone, right now, has experienced some great loss, and somewhere someone just now got their big break. Sometimes I feel the weight of the world, and I raise my eyes to look across the room, and someone looks like the picture of peace. We all get our chance at one opposite or the other. We will always be tilting back and forth, in our perceived chaos. I trust God has it under control.


Has the world stopped?
I thought I felt its axis shift.
I am hanging onto
A rail, seasick, back of
My hand over my mouth.
I am sure the world has changed.
I see everything through cracks
In a mirror splitting the scenery
In pieces. It doesn’t fit together.
Did it ever? Did I force it
Into a misconstrued puzzle
Where the sun is below and
The ground is in the sky?
And I called it normal.
I said, look at all my
Normalcy. Marvelous how
I strike perfect angles against
The blurred backdrop of
Dissidence. See how I make
Clear lines, drawing them with
My finger (but don’t notice the
Nail, chewed to the quick and
Bleeding). Perhaps the world
Has fallen on its side, a bulbous
Giant unable to right itself, and
I am stuck underneath it, the breath
Leaving me. I reach for the ground,
But it is in the sky and the sun burns
My fingers. My hands are bathed in flame
And I pull them back, helpless.
I start drawing lines again.