Kryptonite

I really don’t want to rush summer to its soon-coming end but I find I’m having to suppress my early onset giddiness as I begin having visions of plaid stadium blankets and acorns, and oak leaves. Pumpkin spice everything cometh and for others like me who love to wear multiple layers of sweaters with jackets and oversized faux woolen scarves, and bake apple crisps, and simmer chili on the back of the stove . . . it can be hard not to want to nudge the beautiful season of summer to its conclusion—to fast forward to the season finale. But I press pause on my own preferences for the moment and envision a summertime scene of a blazing bonfire on the beach. The crackling orangey flames, with each addition of fuel, leap higher and higher towards the sky. This isn’t the slow burning, embers just right, kind of fire that produces toasty, tawny marshmallows of perfection. This is a beach-sized version of a house-a-fire.

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Taking several steps back from the seaside inferno here described a most interesting image of juxtaposition fills the flat screen of my mind. There’s the vastness of the water just beyond and in the foreground the burning bonfire.

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So close in proximity. One is all powerful. The other is its Kryptonite. Yet they dance together in a beautiful way. You do your thing and I’ll do mine, agreeing to disagree who has the upper hand here. One sustains life while the other brings light and heat. They couldn’t be from further apart at their opposite ends of the spectrum. Catch a fish supper from one and cook it over the flames of the other. That’s a perfect collaboration if you ask me. Yet all it will take is a bit more gravitational pull to bring a rolling wave of H2O beyond its prescribed boundary and in a moment the Kryptonite will have created a whimpering, fizzled out pile of charred fuel. Seems cruel and yet the properties of each contain much power.

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Best to stay friends. Best to do your amazing thing with the super powers you’ve been entrusted with and not to use your own giftedness (what ever it may be) to overwhelm someone else’s flame or gravitational pull. Better to dance together than to extinguish a super power of a different genre.

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Just dance.

Image by Spirit Tribe Awakening on Youtube