For years, what we consider normal has been strained almost to a breaking point. Like a rope that has been pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for something to snap it in half. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie those two ends back together or undo the dangling old pieces to see what we might knit from them?
Covid-19 is showing us that, when humanity becomes united in a common cause, phenomenally rapid changes are possible. None of the problems in contemporary life are difficult to solve; the problems emerge from human disagreement. When we work together in collaborative ways, humanity’s creative powers are limitless.
Covid-19 is demonstrating the power of our collective determination when we agree on what is important. What else could we achieve with such communion? What do we want to achieve and what kind of world do we want to create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.
Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. In order to interrupt an addictive habit, we must first make it visible. We must turn it from a compulsion to a choice. And once the crisis has subsided, then we might have the possibility to ask ourselves whether we want to return to normal or whether there may be something we’ve seen during the disruption of the routines that we want to bring into the future.
For most of my life, I’ve had the feeling that humanity has been stumbling toward a crossroads. Always the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent—just around the corner, but it never actually came.
Just imagine walking down the road and ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, past the woods. But you come to the top of the hill and you see that you were mistaken, it was just a mirage. It was farther away than you thought. So you keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from your sight, and it seems like this road just goes on forever and forever. Then you end up thinking, “Maybe there isn’t a crossroads after all.”
But no, there it is again! It was always … almost here.
Now suddenly, you go around a corner and here it is!! You stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening. Hardly able to believe, after all the years of confinement to the road of our ancestors … confinement to the road of the old paradigm—now we finally have a choice.
We are right-on to stop—bewildered at the newness —the rawness of our situation. Because of the thousands of paths that radiate out in front of us, many go in the same direction we’ve already been going. Some lead to a hell here on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe possible.
Today, I write to you these words with the intention of standing here with you–astonished, scared maybe, grateful … also with a sense of new hope and possibility –
Let us gaze down and see.
Our institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. Their way of managing information seems to select the most alarming, nonsensical and frightening depictions of it. And … how easily we join in on their panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.
Today’s challenges no longer succumb to force.
There is, however, one thing our society is good at—fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at to prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. So we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them language and mobilize our collective energies toward endeavors that can be seen that way.
When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, interconnected, then it bleeds over into the other and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationships, we no longer search for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but look instead for how the relationships are out of balance.
Covid-19 offers an opportunity to broaden that view. Let’s hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Let’s hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let’s make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well, right, generously and wholeheartedly.
Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love.
Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it flow forward. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its roots so that love seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits.
What world do we want to live in?
Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent.
Our response to Covid-19 set us a course for future possibilities. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physical space has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores we have things delivered to our homes. Instead of kids playing outside, we have play-dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public gatherings, we have the online forums. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves further from each other and the world?
The name for this pandemic gives us a clue: Coronavirus. Corona, yes, is the name of a beer. But it is also a crown. “Coronavirus pandemic” means “crowning” or as I’d like to think of it, an “inauguration of possibilities.” Already we can feel the power of who we might become. True autonomy does not run in fear from life or from death. True autonomy is the ability to “walk humbly under the grace” of a Creator or a Higher Power.
This inauguration marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into connection, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become liberated from addictive forces that ruled us. In a life of new possibilities, the conspiracy theorists’ fears are only a shadow of grace and possibilities available to loving human beings. We build an intentional society on the love that is already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.
With radical gratitude for this community,
Paula
