Balance

I suspect that from time immemorial, human beings have been stacking rocks one atop the other, particularly when they are near the seashore and find an abundance of convenient stones to stack. I did this pile during the second week of our two weeks in Maine…



… and it actually stayed up for about a day until a big storm blew through and knocked half of it down.

The following day, Jeannine and I walked the Marginal Way in Ogunquit prior to having a wonderful dinner at a place called "Five-O" in that little coastal town with Emily and her friends Jenelle and Lindsay. The Marginal Way is a very cool 1.5 mile paved path which follows the coastal rocks between Perkins Cove and Ogunquit Beach. It's quite a beautiful walk, with some great vistas of the ocean and the shore rock formations. The day we did the walk, the winds were blowing quite hard and the waves were quite spectacular. Here's a shot I took of Jeannine and me along the way…



Further on down the path, we were startled and amused to find more evidence of what I postulated in the first line of this blog entry -- dozens and dozens of small piles of beach rocks stacked on some of the larger rock formations near the path. Someone (or a group of someones) had been quite busy doing a lot of balancing of stones. This photo represents about a tenth of the total number of these things that we saw that day in this area.



And balance is one theme with which I come away from this two-week vacation. It's the first time I can remember that I have really fully enjoyed a vacation, and the first time I can remember that I was sad to leave and come home. I feel as though I have made significant strides towards moving to a more balanced, healthy life, one in which worries and concerns take their true proportionate place alongside the joys and pleasures of life. I'm not completely there yet -- that's going to take a while still -- but this was a big step. -- PL