.
Ultimately, a stone stays ‘balanced’ because it makes contact, not with one, but at least three unique points with the stone below.
These are often infinitesimal 'points' of contact, too small to see, but nevertheless, real. They form a kind of tiny tripod. If there were only two points of contact, the stone on top would fall away.
The dynamic of the tripod configuration creates a magical thing called balance.
Eventually, after an imposed time of being separated from each other, and undergoing a regime of isolation, we too, as a species (if we are not to fall completely off the planet) will need to establish contact again.
I’m not even sure it’s right to say ‘again’. There’s no indication humans in the past found the kind of balance we are all going to need after what looks like a long period of separation .
But I suggest there are at least three ‘touch points’ we will need to find when we come out of isolation.
Hopefully when we emerge from our exile there will be a yearning for a totally new kind of social contact.
And we’ll all be willing to create something more dynamic than the artificial glues, toxic cements and manufactured fasteners that we were content to use before. Three important points of contact of this new ‘balanced’ contact, will be emotional, physical, but more especially, metaphysical.
We, like lonely boulders will find ourselves in families.
The discarded piles of stones will come together and discover order and purpose.
The precious shaped buried stones will be unearthed and cherished.
We, like well-placed stones in a garden wall, will no longer be sporadically dotted around indiscriminately.
There will be a pattern of touching, totally different from the self-centred configurations of ‘pointlessness’ we have for too long pretended to be ‘balanced’ in the past.
