Equinox is the time of year when day and night are of the same length. The Earth is at its midpoint along the long side of its elliptical orbit around the sun, putting us closest to that fiery orb. This is the balance point of the season–the time of year when it is said that an egg will balance on its point.

What is balance? When we look at the world as 2-sided, bilateral, one-way-or-the-other-way (like right or wrong, good or bad, black or white, conservative or liberal) you might picture a scale with each side coming to balance in a static and stable way. Equal and balanced. You might picture a tug of war where two sides pull and create tension to keep each side in check. But the world doesn’t work that way. Options, ways of thinking, personalities, political systems, economic structures are as diverse and plentiful as the species in the Amazon Rainforest. All options are in constant motion. The world is in constant motion. Balance becomes a complex dance.

If there are many options, there are also many ways to balance a system. Earth is a system. And there are many systems on Earth–political, economic, cultural, natural–each entwined with the other. What does it mean to live in balance on the Earth? What would a world in balance look and feel like? Certainly not what we have now!

A balanced, sustainable, replenishing and healthy system is not one where all parts constantly thrive with ease. While a healthy amount of challenge or grit is imperative for a system to thrive, the parts of the system ultimately need to cooperate and co-create in order to be sustaining. This is nature. This is also the way of balance. Wouldn’t it be lovely for the systems of Earth, including the political-economic systems, to work well in this way?

Hazel Henderson wrote in a 2006 article 21st Century Strategies for Sustainability that global market economics is based nearly exclusively on the notion that competition and self-interest are rooted in human nature. Yet, she says:
research by scientists from many fields . . . have invalidated the core assumptions underlying economic models – which dominate public and private decision-making in most countries, multi-lateral agencies, including the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organization . . . Yet today, as privatization and technological evolution speeds change and globalization, economists and their general equilibrium models still drive these processes. While competition remains a key driver in evolution and all human affairs, cooperation and co-evolutionary processes are equally important.

I leave you with the thought that balance is not, at it’s greatest, a 2-sided equation of equal and static parts. Balance is complex and it is through much cooperation that systems continually come to balance. More than a system constantly in balance: a system constantly rebalancing.

Dance the dance of balance with me on this 2008 Equinox.

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