The Oneness of Balance

I see today in my 365 Tao reading, and a Facebook post by a Tao friend, that today is the Spring Equinox, a moment of nearly perfect balance between the dark and light, night and day, for everyone, everywhere. I don't know if it's auspicious, but seems like a good day to get a haircut, and then, the photo I need for my China visa application.

On this day I had a curious sensation while cat-sitting for my young next-door neighbor, someone I didn't really know until she knocked on my door last week to ask if I could watch her cats for a few days.  "But of course, I love cats," I said, realizing that now I have another option available to me if I need to have MY cats tended. The folks on my floor aren't really social (maybe no one here is) but we do look out for one another. We are good neighbors, not community members. I keep an eye on the apartment on the other side when its older Japanese orchid-fancier makes his annual visit to Tokyo to see the orchid show.  ("If something seems wrong," he says, "just call the police, don't go in...those crack addicts are dangerous.")

So, I am visiting this handsome Siamese tom and a "foster" female that stays outside on the lanai, to feed, water and do litter box duty (which is forcing me to be a little more regular about my own).

So strange to be alone in a stranger's apartment that is the mirror image of your own's floorplan.  The personality of the owner is very evident, and you can't help noticing the books, the kitchen implements, the accoutrements of someone else's life.  I don't poke through cupboards or closets or anything like that, but one does feel another person's presence and personality, almost as if you could just move in and BE that person.  (I'd like to: she is much more tidy and clean than I am.)

So watering her herbs (as opposed to my ornamentals), feeding her noisy-but-friendly Siamese and the little stray Holstein heifer kitten (as opposed to my big yellow tabby and the plump French matron), cleaning her covered litterboxes (as opposed to my wide-open ones), contemplating her framed print of plum blossoms (as opposed to my landscape scroll), observing her large-flat screen TV in the living room (as opposed to my 19" box in the bedroom), I realize that really, in the final analysis, we are exactly the same. It is only "stuff" that makes us different. And not much of a difference at that.  So in caring for her cats, I am really looking after my own.  Everything balances, evens out.

Such is my observation on this Spring Equinox, 2010.