Fire cools.
Water seeks its own level.

 

No matter how extreme a situation is, it will change.  It cannot continue forever.  Thus, a great forest fire is always destined to burn itself out; a turbulent sea will become calmer.  Natural events balance themselves out by seeking their opposites, and this process of balance is at the heart of all healing.

The process takes time.  If an event is not great, the balancing required is slight.  If it is momentous, then it may take days, years, even lifetimes for things to return to an even keel.  Actually, without these slight imbalances, there could be no moment in life.  It is being off balance that keeps life changing.  Total centering, total balance would only be stasis.  All life is continual destruction and healing, over and over again.

That is why, even in the midst of an extreme situation, the wise are patient.  Whether the situation is illness, calamity, or their own anger, they know that healing will follow upheaval.
 
 

healing
365 Tao
Deng Ming-Dao
Daily Meditations
 

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The Great Wave at Kanagawa
(from a Series of Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji),
Edo period (1615­1868),
ca. 1831­33
Katsushika Hokusai (Japanese, 1760­1849);
Published by Eijudo Japan

Polychrome ink and color on paper;
10 1/8 x 14 15/16 in.
(25.7 x 37.9 cm)
(Oban size)

Description

The preeminence of this print—said to have inspired both Debussy's "La Mer"and Rilke's "Der Berg"—can be attributed, in addition to its sheer graphic beauty, to the compelling force of the contrast between the wave and themountain. The turbulent wave seems to tower above the viewer, whereas the tiny stable pyramid of Mount Fuji sits in the distance. The eternal mountain is envisioned in a single moment frozen in time.

Hokusai characteristically cast a traditional theme in a novel interpretation. In the traditional "meisho-e" (scene of a famous place), Mount Fuji was always the focus of the composition. Hokusai inventively inverted this formula and positioned a small Mount Fuji within the midst of a thundering seascape. Foundering among the great waves are three boats thought to be barges conveying fish from the southern islands of Edo (modern Tokyo). Thus a scene of everyday labor is grafted onto the seascape view of the mountain.
 

The Metropolitan Museum of Art