Yin Yang

It’s hard to add anything to Alan Watts, but I can at least summarize some his points in my own words.

Opposites don't exist without each other.  The light doesn’t exist without the darkness to compare it to, and the darkness cannot exist without the light to compare it to. Any opposites need each other to define themselves; the sweet and bitter, inside and outside, qualitative and quantitative, hard and soft, prickly and gooey, protons and electrons, etc.

Life is vibration, a sine wave singing and dancing, and we all rise and fall in crests and troughs. The yang is crest and yin is the trough. Neither is better and neither could exist without the other. The war itself is an illusion; a mere play.

Further, there is some darkness in light and some light in darkness. No one is purely good or purely evil, if we were to use such oversimplified concepts. Good people do evil things and evil people do good things. Every outside is inside something else. And so on.

If you were a speck on the paper you might see only white or only black, but the truth is more complex.  There is a balance that can only be seen from a zoomed out perspective.

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Some birds lord their position in the sky over the fish of the sea, since birds eat fish but fish do not eat birds.

Mostly.

But no matter how high or low a bird flies; whether it feeds on insects or fish or other birds or carrion or eggs; whether it uses its sharp vision during the daylight or stalks at night; no matter if the creature of the sea swims in schools or hides in coral; is king tiger that eats anything, unchallenged great white, or the whale collecting its plankton dues; of the shallows where life abounds or the hellish depths where only detritus sustains; in both kingdoms all of life was created by One Source, One True God Who saw that all of it was Good.  Struggle, if you must, to find balance.  But only for balance.

I tip my bill to the water fowl, for they are birds of the air that can fly, but not as high as Icarus's folly.  They are never too far removed from the surface of the water, from whence all life first evolved.  Rule they might, but lord they never.