Pluses and minuses

This handsome fellow was fishing in the shallows of the lagoon at low tide, late yesterday afternoon.  We have mixed feelings about the eagles here: even though their species is no longer considered endangered, we've been conditioned to consider them rare and somehow special (though I confess, on seeing one up close, I always hear the voice of Sam, the muppet eagle).

We love to watch them soar, their broad wings with their distinctive tips; their white tails spread as they dip and cruise over the water, looking for salmon.  But we loved the herons, too, the ones whose rookery on the hill above us was the second largest in North America -- until the eagles came and decimated all their young.

... and doesn't that always seem to be the way of things?  When we protect one thing, something else often seems to suffer.  When one thing's going well, something else is not. Life, it seems, is rarely perfect -- the water in the glass is almost always sitting at the halfway point -- and we're the ones who get to choose our focus: half-empty, or half-full.

I'm learning, as I age, to be grateful for the balance, to listen for what needs to change while understanding that for every action there may also be re-action.  And as I write, the words of Joni Mitchell's Both Sides Now begin to echo in my head:

"Well, something's lost but something's gained
In living every day.

I've looked at life from both sides now
From WIN and LOSE and still somehow
It's life's illusions I recall
I really don't know life at all."