Balance and its Discontents

On the 20th of March, we marked the Vernal Equinox, the moment of astronomical balance in the great wobble that comes with the Earth’s circling of the sun. Daylight and dark about evenly distributed. The winter ends and spring bursts forth. There may be some reluctance on the part of one to leave or the other to arrive, but this day is the official transfer of one to the other.

The earth and seasons may be in balance (or close to it) but politically, economically, environmentally and culturally we are not. Everywhere we look the signs of being out of balance - discontent and nervousness, worry and most of all, fear is manifest. Not only in America, but across the whole of the planet. Canada, Mexico, Europe, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Yemen, India, China. No one is sure what comes next. They may have their intentions or their hopes, but action and reaction preclude surety. Much of it interlocked in such a way that the pain or disruption of one, echoes within another.

As much as I might want to lay the blame for it at the cancerous hobbled feet of late-stage or unbridled Capitalism and subsequent economic inequity, the root is deeper, with the wholesale failure of human beings to be empathetic, compassionate and cooperative. These are what is in short supply. These, especially empathy and cooperation, are fundamentals that allowed us to become successful as a species in the first place.

As Buckminster Fuller said, "It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known.”  So why haven’t we done so?

Most humans and certainly most cultures have put their faith in a mythology that says money matters. That the making and having money is the basic purpose of our being in the world and the measure of our success. To that end, we punish the poor (even though our obsession with money is what creates the poor) and covet celebrity and wealth. This is wrong on so many levels. First and foremost, it diminishes our shared humanity and emphasizes the acquisition of wealth. To what purpose? Money is a metaphor. It has value only to the extent that we agree on it having value. You can’t eat gold but you can eat corn, and in money cultures, you can trade gold for corn. The difficulty arises when that trade is out of balance, when the acquisition of money becomes an end in itself. Money is a convenience but when it has become acquisition for the sake of acquisition it is a curse as King Midas found out.

I am on the edge of a political screed but I don’t think I will go there. Suffice it to say, this is a time of transition and not necessarily to the green spring of promise. You can fill in the blank as to where and what you would attribute as the source of fear and imbalance. What the options for response, resistance, or survival are.

With a nod to a conversation I had with Mary Alice Arthur, I want to offer a word of praise and gratitude for libraries and librarians.

In America, 1,689 libraries were built between 1883 and 1929 with funds from Andrew Carnegie. At the time he was one of the wealthiest men in the country and believed that philanthropy should “benefit the ordinary man who wanted to better himself” through access to free books / learning. He looked to the role the library had played in his own self-education and decided that their construction and use were not only a public good but a necessity for a robust civic life. He was right that they are bastions of community and historically an essential service for all regardless of gender, race, religious belief or political leaning.

I remember my excitement being in grade school in Albuquerque, going to the old public library on Central Avenue with its adobe architecture. I loved the smell of the place and the half-light peeking through the high small windows.

I don’t remember getting children’s books but instead non-fiction books about military equipment, planes, ships, and biographies of Western figures like Kit Carson, Jim Bridger or Billy the Kid. The kind of books that made grade school more interesting when living in what was essentially a military-industrial town and wanting to know the history and scope of the war machine that overlaid the original Spanish settlement and tourist oasis on the fabled Route 66.

In 1963 I was in the Benilde High School library, reading Sci-fi (I think it was Clark’s “The Nine Billion Names of God”) when Kennedy’s assassination was announced and we were being sent home. Suddenly the world was out of balance. When I returned to school the thought occurred that one the few places where I could find instruction on what that might mean or how to personally remain calm in the midst of crisis was in books.

The great joy of going to college in Winona in the late ‘60’s was there were the libraries at each school – College of St Theresa, Winona Sate and St. Mary’s – which had significant differences in their collections, and like class credits which could be transferred from one to another, were accessible to every student no matter which college you were registered at.

One of the best parts of living on 53rd and Lyndale was the Washburn library across the street. Walk a half a block and get a daily fix of the Star Tribune and the New York Times, a weekly or monthly fix of the Atlantic, Harpers, Esquire, GQ, New Republic, Rolling Stone, and whatever else caught my eye. There was a relaxed serenity sitting in a comfortable chair, looking up from the pages of a newspaper or magazine to see Minnehaha Creek across the street.

I will confess that as a storyteller and poet, I have never turned down a library gig. Whether it was week-long multiple Friends of the Library tours with John Berquist, or appearances in numerous Carnegie libraries during my year-long Humanities Scholar in Residence sojourn in northern Minnesorta, including a joint performance with Robert Bly in Moose Lake. The stories told in and the stories told about those library performances are close to my heart. So much so, that I have made an application for a State Arts Board grant to revisit Northern MN and once again offer (adult) stories, poems and conversations in area libraries.

I salute and thank librarians who welcome all and stand against book banning. I think of libraries as one of the ripest fruits of democracy, the embodiment of the first amendment guarantees of freedom of religion, speech, the press, the right to assemble peacefully, and the right to petition the government. I encourage each of you reading this to recognize and campion libraries as bastions and librarians as defenders of those first amendment rights.

Being a day late, and having gone down the wandering path of memory I will draw this to a close. Spring has begun and will flower whether the market rises or falls or the “war on DEI” halts progress towards a more just and inclusive culture or accelerates the end of WASP patriarchy through overreach. History shows (for those who can learn from it) that every imbalance comes to an end – whether by destruction, replacement, transformation or emergence - something “new” will come and with it a rebalancing of the world.

Both the miracle and the irony of our present state is that the world has been here long before our various efforts to build empires in our image and likeness and after they fall as well. For all our cleverness, if we remain out of balance with the seasons and the natural world, we will go the way of the dinosaurs. The world will continue whether humans disappear or prosper. Time is not on our side. Ask the dinosaurs. It never has been. Or as it is put in one of the old stories, “This too will pass.”

Be well. Take care of yourself and each other.