All these years on, the accounting is still a mess.
One expects gains to have canceled losses;
New people and places and things to perhaps replace those lost.
But the intangibles?
How does a swelling of courage offset evaporation of faith?
How does unlooked-for new clarity replace trust that crumbled into dust?
A spoonful of pure gold
Needs a roomful of ore:
Dug, crushed, ground,
Reacted, leached, extracted,
Purified with electricity, with fire.
An intense pleasure of my profession as a chemical engineer is the practice of balancing. Not the balancing of a body in movement (although I do know that pleasure – in dance and in Aikido), but the balancing of accounts of the earth itself. Everything that comes out of the earth goes back into it. Or almost everything.
