Skip to main content

Covid19 Journal Entry 2



March 23, 2020 - Happy Birthday John!

Today’s idea - what if humans were plants? A body of absorbing cells, practicing osmosis to define its posture and constitution.  Wait! Humans are all this too, these ways of living that were passed on to us from our phototropic progenitors,  we are kin with those woody sages peopling the Earth with us.  Do plants feel fear like us? Do they receive dispatches that make them anxious and tucked in?  We wake to floods of fearful news.   We want to shrivel up like scared hedgehogs as a way to shield ourselves.  Meanwhile, even in a storm of ping pong ball size hail, trees keep themselves open to receive light, drawing in seasonally instead of episodically. It seems to me that now is the most important time to stand fortified, strong. We have what we need, we built our homes from the bounty of our place. Our volition shows up now as privilege. With all the things we have taken as if they were just given, surely we can employ their attributes now to carry us through these fraught days.  What are we made of anyway? Rain forests, mountain tops, vulnerable species turned into commodities, clean water and air, miles of topsoil, coral reefs, wetlands, permafrost, glaciers, fossil fuels and rare earth elements.  Here has been the fuel and power of a high time civilization. Did we take for granted the convenience of open-hearted living when everything is easy. Can we continue with the bon mots when danger seems out of control. Keep on the sunny side of life. Good idea. Find the silver lining. Appropriate. Keep our chins up. And our fingers off our faces. Here now the evolutionary springboard presses under our toes? How will we launch?

Today’s image - Imagine a generous world? What colors predominate? How does it sound? What is its perfume? Its fingerprint? How does it grow stronger? Kinder? Smarter? Resilient? How does its benevolence connect us  with the grand network of being? How does it teach us gratitude? Patience? How does it feed our hearts? Grow into humility? What can we become when we recognize that we are a piece of this generous world?

Today’s observation - I am learning to be a warrior of pathogen invaders.  Great protectress of the ones that I love. We fight an invisible foe that is found only by its tracks and residue. This poses a strange imperative of challenges.  If I approach day to day threats and avenues for invasion with a attentive curiosity like I would a jigsaw puzzle or a tangle of necklace chains, looking for the patterns and the root of the knots, I can abandon more distracting emotions and dwell among the avenues of solutions for thwarting pernicious worry another day. To make a hub of the simple ways to deter the virus: washing hands with soap and hot water, paying attention to what we touch, maintaining safe social corridors, and to recognize, even admire the stealthy and inconspicuous ways infection spreads, from junk mail just delivered to finger nail to nostril where it incubates and replicates with impunity. Would that we could encyst ourselves, in times like these, like the deer tick during exceptionally cold winters. We'd wait this pandemic out, then uncoil from our thick-skinned hidey hole back into the safe and easy. I hope we can empower the best in one another like the trees do.  Be a keystone species.  Show our kids this is what we will be remembered for.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2020 Pandemic Journey Day 44

May 4, 2020 Today’s idea – What has the fog of our modern conveniences begat? I read an article last night published in 1950 by Berton Roueche’ titled The Fog . In October 1948, a toxic smog settled on the borough of Donora, PA. This town is tucked away on a meander of the Monongahela River in the Allegheny Mountains.   During that time, it was home to three huge mills, a steel plant, and a zinc and sulfuric acid plant. The towering factory stacks of these industries pushed out thick plumes of coal smoke all day and all week. Also, given the town’s proximity to the river, boats and trains added their emission to the cocktail. To seal the deal, Donora sits in the topography of secluded bluffs and hills that allow for little or no wind to carry the smoke and fumes out of town.   So the place was known to be a smutty, smokey mess, tolerated by residents who referred to the sulfurous stench as the smell of money. On this weekend in October, a thermal inversion put a tighter li...
Post a Comment
Read more

Covid19 Journey Day 20

April 10, 2020 Today’s idea – Maybe we’ve needed this for a long time.   To be stopped so we could take a long moment and assess what is alive in us and what is mere rote living, what is unnecessary and what really matters; what we carry by empty habit. To know that busier doesn’t make us more worthy- a good work ethic is not to be confused with constant motion.   We’ve needed this to   learn how to be together as family again, to sit together in conversation, to listen to one another, to play and read together, help solve problems even do homework together, cook together, sit around a table again. And to say to each other, here are boundaries, this is okay and that is not okay because we do that for the ones we love. We needed this to understand that isolation can be hard on some people sheltering in place, the abuser with the abused,   those that must shelter alone, those who need consistent home care for a chronic illness or condition, the family receiving h...
Post a Comment
Read more

Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend

  Death Might Be Just A Holy Rend And life a faithful pillow - a pillow to go flat, a spirit to drift off,  glaciers to melt and raise the sea. The blueprint is clear - Expect a tiny storm of mercy–  full of crows and bottle flies to debride the corpse,  to tithe the land.      And respect the putrid demise - things that fall apart make space for miracles.   Yet there persists the memory of breath rinsed in lavender and salt air. Then the dreams for blood and semen to revive, to metabolize  every tired, sad gospel into a hatch of octopus. Death confesses everything as she conjures her necrosis, as she feigns redemption, fools us with false devotion. She believes our defiance will set her free.   We must let grief to be the thread and needle to darn the rend, renew the cloth. then we can grasp the nascent green of winter wheat in spring.
Post a Comment
Read more