balance?

At a certain point, words begin to falter and break. Beyond that, they fail completely. Poetry is the riding of that ragged edge where they begin to break down.

Anyway, apothegms aside, let's talk about strength for a moment. Somatically speaking I am aware of a certain feeling that has nothing to do with picking up heavy things-- it's more a kind of tensile strength... I can't put it logically:

Strong in the way that a lizard is. Or a braid of rope, a length of wire filament. Something twisted on itself, then again, then again and hammered into place. It isn't pretty. Strong in the way that we say "a strong chemical" or "a strong acid". Or "a strong poison". Half poison, half panacea.

Another way that this occurred to me is to think of the way trees grow. If you want your branches to reach upward, the roots must reach downward. For each growth upward, it takes a corresponding stabilization down, in the earth. If your roots are shallow, so must be your branches. And we see people who grow up tall and say, "Wow, look how tall!" and it occurs to us obliquely, if at all, that the line of earth is a fulcrum point, a mirror. Going up means going down. We see an expression but we see poorly what is behind the expression.