Anybody who has mixed and carried mortar
knows the truth of Seamus Heaney’s poetic line: "two buckets were easier carried than one." The balance created by opposing forces
hanging from both arms saves all the muscles in a person’s back and core. A fellow spends much less energy trying to
keep his balance when he allows gravity to pull in both directions.
Of
course Heaney is interested in more than helping people think about how best to
carry in the groceries. He is describing
the task of holding different worlds together.
Like
Heaney, I grew up in a world that was very different than the one in which I
now live. I ran a buzz saw when I was
10. I stacked hay wagons. I hunted alone
by the time I was 11. Life was shaped by church, school, the seasons and by
family rhythms everyone took for granted.
While
it now seems inconceivable that I would let my 12 year old anywhere near guns
and buzz saws, I still want to carry much of my childhood world with me. I’ve sent my teenager across the world into
Buddhist temples but I still want to explain such things to my 93 year-old
grandmother.
My
great grandma Ethel was scandalized by Television. Even Little
House on the Prairie was threatening because, while Charles and Carolyn Ingalls
were married on the set of Walnut Grove, Hollywood’s Michael Landon and Karen
Grassle were not married in real life. Grandma could not understand how
unmarried actors could get under the same set of covers--even if they were in
long underwear.
I want to carry my
great-grandmother’s bucket to Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood. Sure,
it’s true that without carrying a bucket of diversity my
great-grandmother’s world could become narrow and inhospitable, but it’s also
true that without carrying a load of strong convictions about moral deviancy
our current culture descends into meaningless exploitation.
Society today is imbalanced because so many folks insist on
simplistically carrying only one bucket.
To carry two buckets between social rigidity and cultural chaos is to
bear really good news.
