Equinox Knocks

Hello, balance? Are you there?

reminder from my notebook about last week’s lunar eclipse after watching Andrea Vanzo’s report on social media, and this week’s solar eclipse report from Chani Nicholas

Happy fall equinox plus one week People of Earth! I hope for you this turning of the season is gentle and kind. We’ve just finished the hottest summer on record everywhere. Things are changing. I strive these days for a supportive mindset to navigate the coming years where everything breaks records and the startling becomes commonplace. Currently I respond to climate emergencies such as 110° days that melt transit infrastructure, or car-eating sinkholes, or floods, or gigantic hurricanes like the one that wiped out areas around Asheville, North Carolina, or simultaneous widespread wildfires after freak lightning storms, with shock, disgust, fear or some other reaction originating in my amygdala. This little almond-shaped hind brain buddy plays a role in evaluating threats, regulating emotions, and learning; the amygdala is tied into panic, anxiety, PTSD and other mood ‘disorders;’ to our understanding of how to relate socially; and to learned behaviors associated with addiction. Among other things.

I’ve been asking myself, is there a way for me to shift my understanding of this great earth transformation we are in, from fear response to something more like problem solving? I recognize that I may be engaging in magical thinking here, but I’m ok with that; I am certain that jacking my heart rate just by checking the weather is killing me slowly. Pretending climate collapse is not happening—our current national political policy, and magical thinking of its own sort—is a total failure but it does help me get through the day. The magical thinking I am considering is along the lines of ‘what if I am here to experience this exact scenario? What is the best way for me to learn and grow? On what should I focus? What if I have a secret superpower that is a tiny piece of an interconnected mega-web? What if we each have a secret superpower, and our existences shift depending on how we engage with said power? What if we make it a known power rather than secret?

The problem with the magical thinking, of course, is that the way I pay for my housing in the city where I live involves participating in a corporation that not only creates massive amounts of single-use plastic, but also requires me to drive an hour a day three times a week, engaging with fossil fuels, road rage, surveillance, and weather-related accident risk. Most people I know exist within similar equations, holding ideals skewered by access to tools for existence that are also killing us. I suspect that my secret superpower is not my ability to inventory and deliver individually plastic-wrapped medical doodads (though I accept that people who save lives—definitely a superpower—depend on my department being able to provide the doodads.)

The equinox can be considered a time of balance; same length of day as night. Recent conversational topics focus on the impending decrease of daylight, which is normal for our species I suspect. We—at least those of us currently privileged to live indoors—can enjoy protection from the elements, and, it is to be hoped, reliable heat, so whence the projected misery? Me, I think part of the feeling of impending doom can be laid at the feet of hustle culture. We are expected to do as much work or more during the dark days, since the elevation of the Christmas holiday over the last thirty years—from kind of a big deal for kids to an orgy of consumer consumption—creates undue pressure for all of us. Those of us who make products go into hyperdrive, and those of us who buy products scramble to create illusions of plenty out of thin air. We run around, whipped into excess activity, while the dark rises around us, and we have limited access to charge our metaphorical batteries with sunlight. We have removed rest and stillness from the human calendar and replaced it with nonstop messaging from the amygdala, which gives us one-stop shopping—anxiety, panic, ptsd, addiction patterns—all of which we can exploit during a holiday frenzy. We have been incrementally led into breaking the human contract with the Earth, for the northern hemisphere at least: the ancient pattern of forage, gather/grow; preserve/harvest; rest/dream; this separation from alignment with planetary energy is called progress, civilization, modernity, and most recently, in full doublespeak revisionist history language, The Way It’s Always Been.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the breaking down of social contracts as well. The state of Missouri last week executed imprisoned poet Marcellus Williams by lethal injection, ignoring a million signatures gathered over two petitions, as well as a reprieve pending a review of innocence issued by former governor Eric Greitens. It does not escape me that Missouri is a state that positions itself as ‘pro-life,’ with anti abortion laws on the books as early as 1825, just four years after joining the union. As Cynthia Gorney lays out in her 2000 book Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars, Missouri as a state positions itself militantly in ‘defense of life,’ but evidently that defense extends only to fetuses. How is executing an innocent man a life-affirming action? Mr. Williams’ supporters used all the resistance tools sanctioned by the state: circulating petitions that garnered over a million signatures, phoning and writing the governor, rallying the entire nation to the cause in a peaceful, demure, nonviolent way—and the state, specifically the sitting governor Mike Parson, ignored it all, exercising its power and control to kill—or should we say murder?—an innocent man.

Governor Parson had it in his power to stop this execution and he did not. This is the same governor who spent two years insisting that enacting public health policies to fight COVID-19 would be an overreach of government, yet he had no problem allowing this execution to go forward. The same governor who, in 2021, publicly declared an intent to investigate St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Josh Renaud after Renaud ran a story that embarrassed Parson’s administration. Parsons wanted to use the tools of office to punish a reporter for telling the truth. (After almost four months of being name called and dragged through the press, Renaud was informed in February 2022 that he would not face charges.)

Stories like this make it clear that the phrase ‘pro-life’, in the mouths of double speaking profit hounds like Parson, has become code for pro-controlling the lives of others, and that includes threatening investigative journalists for publishing true stories in towns and cities across the country. And I’m singling Parson out because of his spectacular behavior in what many are calling a modern-day lynching, but we could point to every single member of congress who holds stock (or whose family member holds stock) in Raytheon and other weapons manufacturing businesses. Every time Congress sends another billions-dollar weapons gift to Israel, it pours money directly into the wealth of these elected officials. War profiteers make our laws, in other words.

The social contract, the magical thinking, the mythology of governance holds that we, the people, give our money and our votes to officials who represent us, and will act in our best interests. (To be fair, Mike Parson was not elected, he assumed the governorship when Greitens stepped down in 2018 due to multiple scandals of sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations; his ex- wife Sheena Chestnut Greitens has since accused him of physically abusing one of their children and herself. It just gets more horrible.)

As a GenX person, I’ve never believed that government had our best interests at heart—I grew up in the shadow of Nixon’s shame, became a voter against Reagan while he sold the country to corporations, along with Bill Clinton; I watched Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney, who, let’s remember, shot a friend in the face on a hunting trip, lead the country into a war that boosted his net worth—but despite just these few examples to the contrary, government by the people, of the people, for the people is the mythology of the land. And for a long time white people at least have been able to believe in it, if we averted our eyes very deliberately from our home-grown apartheid systems, if we never looked at poverty, unemployment, public health, and suicide statistics on reservations, if we pretended that all the dishwashers and cooks in our favorite restaurants had paperwork. But we just can't do it anymore. The fabric covering the modesty of our nation has rotted through and what’s underneath is what people in North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, western West Virginia are recovering from—a bald and ugly commitment to make the rich richer, to serve corporations, to make sure Israel has plenty of money for weapons, while flood refugees in our own country line up outside the library for connectivity.

It’s so frustrating. Humans in general are kind and good. People in Appalachia are taking care of each other using simple and effective grass roots organizing. Shoutout to Libertie and our friends at Firestorm Bookstore Co-op; they are hosting daily meetings to connect residents of Asheville and Buncombe County with resources. You can support Appalachians here. This is what we do, us humans. We connect. This is our encoded programming, woven into our dna. How can we get back to that?

Astronomer Guy Ottewell gave me permission to share his cool chart of the year; Earth is the white circle in the middle of the blue dark/light moon shadow circle.

How, in this scenario can we find balance? I had migraines all last week, so I couldn’t get this equinox essay out ‘on time’ but the question remains. Marcellus Williams has completely disappeared from the news cycle, washed away in the incredible disaster of a hurricane-driven flood of biblical proportions hitting a mountain town. Flooding in the mountains. Killing of innocents. War profiteers squatting in our legislature.

There’s an eclipse across the planet happening right now. Astrologers tell us this will be the last of its kind for several decades, and encourage a look back, what was happening twenty-some years ago? What do we need to release? What can we let go of? What are we healing? What truth are we afraid to see? To tell? To know? How horrible to be an American of German descent and watch Germany flirt openly again with fascism, that’s a truth I do not want to know. How heartbreaking to have been a person sounding a gong about fascism for thirty years, and now that it’s arguably here in many many ways, there’s still no recognition. To be the Cassandra generation, vilified for pointing out genocides, climate collapse, ocean acidification, the apartheids. Did you know that the diplomatic editor of the Guardian is the grandchild of a general who helped establish British control of Egypt? Did you know that the editor of the American edition of Vogue magazine is that same general’s granddaughter? Did you know that the editor of the Atlantic served in the Israeli (Occupying) Force and worked as a prison guard? Did you know that I was a journalism major but I switched to being a fiction major because I could not handle the level of sludge I would have to swim through in order to “succeed?”

My friend and longtime collaborator Erin Yanke says that my superpower is resistance to programming, the social programming that I flunked before I even graduated from college. This programming rewards us for closing our eyes, hearts and minds, to the genocides of Gaza, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo; that rewards us for separating humans into categories of ‘legal’ or ‘illegal’ based on paperwork; endless lists here of the ways we are asked to dehumanize fellow citizens of Earth. When we accept the myth of The Way It’s Always Been we can navigate higher education, get better jobs, earn more money, get decent health care, are better able to care for our children. When those children grow up to be ‘other’—if they are queer, need an abortion, marry outside the rigid permissions of the programming, resist genocides funded by our tax dollars, agitate for prison abolition—we can ‘other’ our children, blame them for peeling back the filthy tatters around the myth of this nation. We can tell them it’s their fault they are under-resourced—didn’t we risk everything getting them a fancy education so they could ascend socially?

I appreciate this ‘History of the Good Future’ exercise by astronomer Guy Ottewell. In the words of the people of Minneapolis on the night of the burning of the Third Precinct, “It didn’t have to be this way.” Will this be our planetary epitaph?

So as we teeter into winter, I am reminded that balance is not a static condition. I remember taking long walks on railroad ties as a kid, arms out to my sides, wobbling back and forth. We wobble back and forth, this planet, before coming into a place of harmony. We don’t expect that harmony to last, we remain vigilant. We fall sometimes. We remember that our arms, flung wide in balance, are open to receive.

from Artists Against Apartheid

thanks for reading. subscribers please enjoy this piece I wrote to launch a new social practice venture, Umbrellas in the Shitstorm. Take care of yourselves. We are all connected.