Tom's out again early with his camera, and I am up again early with coffee and my letter to you. The weather has been lovely for the past couple of days--sunny and warm, breezy and not too humid, though there's a bit of a haze from the Canadian fires. I spent much of yesterday working on a poem, with small breaks to stake my pepper plants, replace a part in the broken string trimmer, and set up a new external hard drive for my laptop. By the end of the day I was feeling downright handy.

Today I should probably use that string trimmer, and also do some weeding in the Hill Country between the driveways, and start moving my big composted leaf pile, and maybe harvest some dill for drying. T and I are talking about going into town to see the Passamaquoddy basket artist Jeremy Frey's show at the Portland Museum of Art. I might stop in at the fish market, I might mess around with my poem draft some more, I might take a walk along the bay . . . it's peaceful to have no solid plans.

Lately I've been thinking again about that word balance. I know I've argued here in the past against the way in which people tend to snatch at this notion when they're feeling overwhelmed in their daily lives. Often, I think, the lament for balance is code for yearning. It is a sign of lack, a signal that people are not able, for whatever reason, to demand the time they need to focus on making.

But balance is bad for art. At Monson Maudelle gave a stellar presentation about the way in which sonic balance actively dulls both individual poems and collections. Teresa likewise offered prompts that demonstrated how important it is to break formal patterns, to create friction.

I grew up in an atmosphere of extreme duty, in which being uncomfortable, unsatisfied, self-denying always trumped joy. To make art, I had to go rogue . . . but first I had to learn to rebel. That education has taken decades, and I have needed all the help I could get--from Tom, from my mentor Baron Wormser, from friends, from my sons, from books, from the ideas I began to explore in my teaching.

All of this learning was friction. It rubbed away at the received notion that service to others required negation of self.

And now that I am almost 60 years old, I see that my life has not been balanced at all. It has been a lurch; it has been a spinning carnival ride; it has been leaning out too far over the edge to snatch at the gold ring that will always be out of reach.

My older son turns 30 today, an amazement and a delight and an oh-my-god-how-did-we-all-get-here-in-one-piece celebration. There was no balance in our household. There was high emotion and "Don't bother me; I'm reading" and mining each other for material and rushing off into the woods and building rickety forts stuck together with tape and twine.

Private life and household life, a family obsession with story and structure and comedy and tragedy and with making things . . . everyone was always making things and most of the time the things we made fell down, fell apart, turned into something strange, got lost among the trees. We had no balance but we staggered on.

I don't have any advice for anyone--except to say that staggering isn't necessarily a mistake. Neither is rushing off into the woods. What would have been a mistake? Rocking gently in easy waters, never tipping too far to one side or the other.

Balance would have lulled me to death. It would have killed me.