Yin Power

Having grown up with a mother who exercised it effortlessly, I have never doubted the power of the feminine. In fact, I saw a natural balance between my parents, resulting in a capacious and safe world which they made around them. The photograph above was taken in 1962. My mother was 42, my father 43. It was taken to document the fact that my parents were about to move the family across the state of Iowa from the town of Clermont, to the even smaller town of Joice. 

I had begun my last year of high school. When I think about it now, I cannot imagine how my parents packed up that large parsonage while we were at school. My youngest sister Ann was barely toddling and David had probably just started school. The move was to take place at Thanksgiving. It is a striking example of how, around my mother, everything seemed to get done quietly and calmly. 

As the eldest, I usually had a lot of responsibility at home. But this year my quartet had been chosen to participate in the all-state chorus, which took place at Thanksgiving. My parents encouraged such participation and worked around it. I went down to Des Moines with my teacher and fellow chorus members, and when I got back, we left for Joice along with a moving van! It was quite dis-orienting!

The left coast, where I live, is much influenced by Asia. I am more comfortable thinking in terms of yin and yang energy than feminine and masculine power. As Ursula Le Guin defines them, “Yin and Yang are great and equal powers; neither can exist alone, and each is always in process of becoming the other.” When I look back at my parents, I see their balance of power. Dad’s outgoing cheer and warmth, Mother’s gentleness and quiet intelligence.

Our Scandinavian heritage led us to believe that women were the equals of men. Read the Icelandic and Norse sagas and you will find that women caused most of the trouble! Partly too, since we were all girls until my brother came along, I didn’t feel that I was treated differently than another sibling. In addition, as my ambition was all directed toward writing (and who was going to keep a woman from doing that?!), I  wasn’t very concerned about external ceilings, glass or otherwise.

Ursula Le Guin, a great and prolific novelist, grew up in Berkeley with her anthropologist parents, and then lived in Portland, OR, identifying as a Taoist. She once found her father pouring over the Tao de Ching, and later translated this ancient document. Her rendition is excellent, putting things in simple, everyday poetry.

In an address to the graduating class of 1983 at Mills college, at the time a women’s institution, Le Guin advocated that, as women, they become unafraid of dark places. “So what I hope for you is that you live there, in the dark place, not ashamed of being women, consenting captives of a psychopathic social system, but as natives; that you be at home there, keep house there, be your own mistress with a room of your own; that you work there, whatever you are good at, art or science, running your own company or sweeping under the beds.”

Competing in the light does become newsworthy, of course. In our intensely commodified world of eight billion people, it may be that prizes help the arts and sciences to be seen at all. However, in the above address, Le Guin continues: “What hope we have lies … not in the light that blinds, but in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.”

I dislike biographies of people in which we get little personal information, only a list of the prizes they have won! Ann Patchett herself has said that getting a top literary prize does not compare to the pleasure she gets from the community growing up around her Nashville bookstore. And her statement shows what we need. A particular kind of empathetic education, at this point, trumps excellence.

As philosophers point out (Peter Sloterdijk in You Must Change Your Life [2013]), we have been through a very productive period in the modern age, in which medicine, the arts and democracy improved life for humans. But now we must retrain ourselves to live in the shadow of global challenges. Now is the time to change our bad habits to good ones. The earth itself needs protection and our previously dominant exploitative excess is the enemy. We can see everywhere what an effort this kind of education is.

In a blog piece Le Guin wrote in 2015, a couple of years before her death: “My guess is that the kind of thinking we are, at last, beginning to do about how to change the goals of human domination and unlimited growth to those of human adaptability and long-term survival is a shift from yang to yin, and so involves acceptance of impermanence and imperfection, a patience with uncertainty and the makeshift, a friendship with water, darkness, and the earth.”

It is clear that humans have emphasized the yang, moving side of ourselves as we struggle to make ourselves comfortable. We have paved the earth, polluted the air and become a species of eight billion. But the earth, nature, is having its say as well. It is all about balance. If we want to help this re-balancing process, we can make our footprint smaller, moderate our tendency toward the extremes and cultivate our inner, rather than our outer worlds. We have a long way to go.

My parents were happy within their small towns, my father a pastor, my mother a high school teacher. Their chief recreations were in nature, canoeing, bird watching and photography. Their legacy to us, besides the gifts of health and happiness, has been a cabin on a Minnesota lake. And more than that, the freedom each of us has had to become ourselves, face adversity and share our understanding with others. The welcome legacy of balance.