Covid19 Journey Day 18

April 8, 2020

Today’s observation- Took another bike ride, headed back down to the river and west to Davenport.  So not to repeat last year’s flood catastrophe, the city has established a sturdy temporary flood wall and barricaded River Dr through the downtown stretch.  Rise you Mississippi, gravity your skin, we know you're pushing but you're not coming in, not by the hair of our chinny chin chin.  As I rounded the far side of my loop to head back, a thunderstorm crawled up behind me and there was nothing to do but push on through the wind and the thunder.  I was pelted with pea sized hail and cold-water pellets, a mini Part 2 of the night before.  I thought to myself, “Could this ride be even more dangerous than venturing out while over sixty in this time of a coronavirus epidemic?’ Something inside me beamed with reckless consent as I pedaled on pushing my luck.  With rain dripping off my glasses and a satisfied grin, I rode past other intrepid Iowans just singing, jogging, walking the dog in the rain, albeit it acres apart.

Today’s image – I knew it!  The world has grown quieter over the last month.  National Geographic documented the decibel decline in major cities around the world in a recent article.  I’m imagining that we could be on track for finding our new groove that funnels us toward sustainable life on the planet.  Have people found a replacement therapy that was once filled with retail shopping?  How does cooking at home raise the happiness index?  “Soon, but not right now” is a perfect newly paced affirmation or term for consent.  How long does it take for contrived darkness and unfounded fear to transfigure into light and love?  Look outside, it happens every Spring.  True this is a time of year blessed by living in a temperate climate, a place with four seasons.  And how assumptively we have slid into our temperate climate cosmology and called it universal. Where even our mythology is seeded in the geography north of the Tropic of Cancer, where sunlight slants with the tilt of Earth.  (I hope you notice how well I am practicing my surrender of fixed perspective.)  I’m asking, what seasons drive the cosmology of kindred cultures elsewhere on the planet, those nested in maybe two seasons or ten? Is darkness universally hallowed because it grants rest and restoration? Is light the boogey man that drives us to exhaustion. Where does quiet live in the equatorial places?  What slows the engines of desire in paradise?

Today’s idea – I ranted yesterday about new age evangelists.  Then today, one more floats up on his YouTube channel, gift of another friendly recommendation. I capitulate and give him a listen, thinking maybe it’s not the proselytizer but me the listener kinking the message into something offensive.  True, I am a religious skeptic, so was my dad. Fruit falling right under the tree. My veritas armor has been tempered in science.  I don’t believe I should just believe a charismatic philosopher; I can come up with my own syllogisms. I understand that for many, they are a comforting tonic in times of trouble or vexation, being inspired by muses of ancient tradition.  I appreciate that inspiration, I do.  But give me a practice not a doctrine; even better give me poetry.  I am surprised at this skeptic’s role, considering myself a live and let live kind of gal.  But I am prone to push back when the zealot herd swells into the mainstream, touting a creed like it was an immutable law.  Here is an assertion that has begun to push my buttons: “Humans are being readied to ascend to 5D.” What the hell? As someone firmly footed in the four dimensions – I am galled that such apostolic claims expect the respect, unformed and unfounded, even as we have been yet unable to render such to our 3D Eden, the natural world that supports us so generously.  (Hold on or not, I’m relaunching this rant for another few sentences.  Then hopefully it will transfigure into something poetic.) Help me discern the difference between the blind faith allegiance of Matt Kahn’s devotees (who want to manifest an escape hatch from a fire we started) and that of a Pentecostal Megachurch in Texas (maybe there is none and it doesn’t matter). Bliss comes in different flavors. So why am I as bothered when Matt Kahn glibly affirms, we have arrived at the eve of a 5D ascension as when a Pentecostal congregant believes she can mega-gather and not share Covid infection because she is covered in Jesus’s blood.  (Put me in time out until I return to my kinder sensibility. Except I think time out is what brought me here.)   In the end, my curiosity leads me by the hand to the video sermons of Kahn or Wilcock.  “Here, sit,” it coaxes, “You know what to do: empty your cup, go to beginner’s mind, crack the code, get beyond the words.” If there is a paradigm shifter nested in the litanies of these 5D gurus, one that inspires more humans to be kinder and more generous among the other biosphere populations, I want to hear that story.  But pray that they are not more crazy edifices built in the name of revelation, that do little but stratify and divide us.  How about something that unifies? How about a good poem?  Antonio Machado activates my spirit with lines like these:

            Last night as I was sleeping
            I dreamt – marvelous error! –
            that a spring was breaking
            out in my heart,
            I said, along which secret aqueduct
            Oh water, are you coming to me
            Water of a new life
            that I have never drunk?

            Last night as I was sleeping,
            I dreamt – marvelous error! -
            that I had a beehive
            here inside my heart.
            And the golden bees
            were making white combs
            and sweet honey
            from my old failures.

            Last night as I was sleeping,
            I dreamt – marvelous error! -
            that a fiery sun was giving
            light inside my heart.
            It was fiery because I felt
            warmth as from a hearth,
            and sun because it gave light
            and brought tears to my eyes.

            Last night as I slept,
            I dreamt – marvelous error! -
            that it was God I had
            here inside my heart.