I don’t recall what drew me first to Alexander Calder’s kinetic mobile sculptures. There was a mobile that hung in the air of my youth, French ballerinas or maybe they were fairies. Whatever they were, they were well dressed. When learning to make them, I began with brightly colored felt, cut into circles, turquoise, red, yellow. I thought they were fantastic and whimsical. Others thought they looked like a kids art project, horrendous, and that I was wasting my time. First metaphor. When beginning, don’t trust anyone certain of endings.

The mobiles have taken me again, call it my pandemic sourdough. To make them is to be immersed not only in the materials: metals, copper and bronze, wires, loops, now apple cider vinegar, salt and paper towels for the fine cerulean and amber patinas - but to live in their essential metaphors, balance, interconnectedness, and levity.

You build a mobile from the bottom up, fixing pieces of metal to each end of the wire, and then forming a loop in the wire somewhere between the two pieces. The placement of the loop determines whether the pieces will sit horizontally or one piece will rise above the other. As you build from the bottom up, each limb holds the weight of all the pieces beneath it. But moving the loop off the center allows something small to hold up against something mighty. Balance then is not two equal halves. Balance is the sensitivity at the place where opposing forces converge. 

This week I am helping a family through the worst. And I am consumed with their sorrow, as I am tasked with bedtime and bottles. To hold my new baby as I console a mother who has just lost hers. The loops of equilibrium that hang in the window taught me how to balance the throes of my heart. There is nothing equal in the experience. There are falling stars and thunderstorms black holes and rain hanging in my sky.

The sculpture is complete now and Rumi asks me at dinner, “Baba why are you always staring at the butterflies.” I tell her I’m watching them move. I’m watching how when the wind catches one piece it turns the pieces above and below, and they turn each of the pieces they touch, my eyes tracing the interconnectedness of all the pieces. And then I find myself staring at the world as I stare at the mobiles, thousands of dried spring buds blowing off the trees, every piece connected, the people and cars in the crosswalk, all in collective motion with invisible threads between. 

We know now how connected we are to one another. How much we need each other. How much of our lives can we live in that truth, instead of feigning contented isolation?

When those criteria are worked, balance made within, connectedness apprehended, gravity breaks. The wires disappear and there are circles, leaves, rain, planets, butterflies hovering over the dinner table. Fairies sprinkling dust over all those who look to see them. You are flying too, through the kinetics of your days, over the ample hills of Brooklyn, inside a zooming centipede that steps across continents, beneath the forest of the deep where the treasures of your woundedness and healing reside.

All the wisdom of life kept in the paltry hobbies that fill our days. You love bread? I love fermentation and transformation mysteries and everything we bring to lay at the altar.