Balance, Longing, and Gratitude

I am working on a small service for Wednesday evening. This is a 30-minute online Vespers, a time for poetry, song, and reflection. My theme is balance. I'm blending Dorianne Laux's Balance, the excerpt below from Kurt Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan, in which he writes of lovely and fanciful creatures called harmoniums that have found their own balance in the deep caves of Mercury, and David Whyte's essay on Longing in his (gorgeous, strange, brilliant) book Consolations.

And for the song, of course, Life Is Better with You by Michael Franti. I'm rocking this one!

Excerpt from Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

The planet Mercury sings like a crystal goblet.
It sings all the time.
One side of Mercury faces the Sun.
That side has always faced the Sun. That side is a sea of white-hot dust.
The other side faces the nothingness of space eternal.
That side has always faced the nothingness of space eternal. That side is a forest of giant blue-white crystals, aching cold.
It is the tension between the hot hemisphere of day-without-end and the cold hemisphere of night-without-end that makes Mercury sing.
…
There are creatures in the deep caves of Mercury.
The song their planet sings is important to them, for the creatures are nourished by vibrations. ...
The creatures cling to the singing walls of their caves.
In that way, they eat the song of Mercury.
…
The creatures in the caves are translucent. When they cling to the walls, light from the phosphorescent walls comes right through them. The yellow light from the walls, however, is turned, when passed through the bodies of the creatures, to a vivid aquamarine.
Nature is a wonderful thing.
...
Each creature has four feeble suction cups – one at each of its corners. These cups enable it to creep, something like a measuring worm, and to cling, and to feel out the places where the song of Mercury is best.
Having found a place that promises a good meal, the creatures lay themselves against the wall like wet wallpaper.
…
They do not reach maturity, then deteriorate and die. They reach maturity and stay in full bloom, so to speak, for as long as Mercury cares to sing.
There is no way in which one creature can harm another, and no motive for one’s harming another.
Hunger, envy, ambition, fear, indignation, religion, and sexual lust are irrelevant and unknown.
The creatures have only one sense: touch.
They have weak powers of telepathy. ... They have only two possible messages.
The first is an automatic response to the second, and the second is an automatic response to the first.
The first is, ”Here I am, here I am, here I am.”
The second is, ”So glad you are, so glad you are, so glad you are.”