Balance is Everything and Everywhere

Balance is beautiful. 

Miyoko Ohno

In the beginning of our journey we learned that seeing is 1/10 visual and 9/10 mental, words are abstract and not reality. You can't get wet from the word "water". ....


After a few more hours on the road we have arrived at Balance and nothing looks familiar but I have the strange feeling I have been here before.
First, we have to find out how our world is designed and then use that to see how design works in art.

We live in a world of polarities and we need the extreme differences to coexist for the world to work..

Extremes go with each other and one can not exist without the other. A coin doesn’t have just one side, a magnet doesn’t have only a north pole. Day “goeswith” night, hot with cold, up with down etc. etc. You know when you are sad because you have experienced happiness, you know when you are comfortable because there has been a time when you were uncomfortable. Think about being being cold all the time or happy all the time, impossible because you can’t ignore the opposite. Breathing in goes with breathing out.

"The word Happiness would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by Sadness."

Carl Jung

Our earth rotates full circle every twenty four hours which means we have day and night, light and dark, total opposites which go together. There can never be just day or only dark, that would be an imbalance and nothing in our environment would survive. 

We cannot be more sensitive to pleasure 

without being more sensitive to pain.

Alan Watts

The earth also revolves around the sun every 365 days. This enables the seasonal changes to occur and once more we have total differences. The warm summer and cold winter, rain and snow. The decline of fall into winter as well as the rebirth of spring into sumer. Birth and death happen in every aspect of the universe. Humans, animals, insects, plants, planets and stars, all are born and die. Everything changes.

There is nothing permanent except change.

-Heraclitus

Everything in nature is a balance of 
change and repetition

Some changes are extreme while others are subtle, some changes we can control while others we cannot, some happen immediately while other changes take a long time to happen.

Become a student of change. It is the only thing that will remain constant.

Anthony J. D\'Angelo

Change is unavoidable. Change is the difference, the variation that makes everything in our universe stimulating, exciting and new. It's the diversity in our lives that creates excitement. Think about what your life would be like without change.  

Life is like this: sometimes sun, sometimes rain. 

Fijian proverb

So our universe, as we know it, is a balance of opposites, of changes. You can only know change because it’s opposite exists.

Repetition Repetition Repetition
Repetition Repetition Repetition

Repetition creates patterns which give the feeling of security, a sense of connection and oneness. We know that at the end of this day there will be night, at the end of the storm there will be blue sky and sunshine. The seasons are all connect together and we know they will always happen again and again. The reoccurrence of everything adds stability and unity to our life.

Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations.

                                                         Ralph Waldo Emerson

If we look at the rotation of the earth, day and night happens over and over 365 times a year. Summer, fall, winter and spring happen once each year but repeat every year. Emotions don’t happen only once but repeat throughout your life. 

If I accept the sunshine and warmth,

then I must also accept the thunder and lightning.
-Kahlil Gibran

We found the universe is a balance of polarities and equlibrium between change and repetition.  Why is this important?

Because too much change and we have discord and chaos, too much repetition and we have monotony and boredom. So the balance of change and repetition in our lives is necessary for harmony.

Everything that changes also repeats.

"Wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things that differ, and the difference of things that are alike."

                                          Anne Louise Germaine de Stael (1766 - 1817)

Nothing is as important as something

We can't know how design works unless we know how nature works.