April 17, 2020
Today’s
celebration – Last May I attended the annual school fundraising gala. Browsing the items on the silent auction
tables, I found nothing that that stirred my avarice, so I took another tack
and decided to find things that I could have fun with or devise pleasure from,
as a way to justify some necessary opening bids. There was an impressive box of chocolate bars
with a couple bottles of red on which I entered the first bid, and I paused at
a wooden crate with another pair of wines, nice glasses and a gift certificate
for a charcuterie tray. The vintner of
the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay was Kosta Browne. Without a thought of the
initial bid being the winning bid, I scratched my offer on line #1 - $150. I did
covet a set of hand thrown mugs from our headmaster’s wheel, but found my bid
lost in the healthy bid escalations. By
the end of the evening though, I was the winner of the box of wine and chocolate
and the two bottles of Kosta Browne. Once
at home, I inspected my booty and looked up information on the wines joining my
cupboard. I had a treat in store! The Kosta Brown winery, Sebastopol, CA, is a small business that produces award
winning wines. The Pinot is considered
the best wine of the year. I read the
vintners’ notes and tried to educate myself on what would set this one apart so
from the regulars that I drank: Gnarly Head, Meiomi, Kendall Jackson. I just couldn’t suss out how significant
could be the difference. The price point for both of my new wine acquisitions
were almost 10 times what I would normally spend. To my knowledge, I’ve never experienced
wine that cost more than $40/bottle. I
promptly tucked them away for a “special” time.
Tonight, I grabbed that sturdy brown bottle of pinot and brought it with
me to enjoy with cohort friends over dinner.
It was my first social outing since returning to Iowa. Seeing how we are
interacting as colleagues on campus during the week, we felt that we could break
quarantine and enjoy an evening with sensible social distancing on this Friday
night. Staying a step beyond the fray seemed
reason to celebrate. And the wine was
extraordinary! A surprise, I could not
know how unexpected the difference would be, and the pairing with my friends Beef
Bourguignon, perfect! Here was the apt occasion for that glorious bottle to be
uncorked. A Friday night after a long
week of learning how to teach in the virtual world and working to help kids
keep perspective and to keep productive even positive in these trying days, so tenuis
and improbable. And here is a small sign of the virus’s good work. How many years might I have quarantined those
bottles, measuring the merit of a moment against indulging with such treasure
of wine.
Today’s
idea – The virus is a portal, the virus is a knife, the virus is a spotlight. Timely
metaphors are beginning to bob up in the tempest. I listened to Suzanna Arundhati
Roy interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, as she described the Covid19
quarantine experience in India. And writing about it in Financial Times,
she points out some things I’ve noticed, “But unlike capital, the virus seeks
proliferation, not profit… bringing the engines of capitalism to a juddering
halt….long enough perhaps to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide
whether we want to help fix it or look for a better engine….the tragedy is the
wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years.” She talked with Amy about walking with the displaced fleeing
Delhi after Prime Minister Modi gave the country four hours to prepare for its
lockdown in March. “Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class
citizens like so much unwanted accrual.”
People leaving the cities and walking home to neighboring states and
countries were stopped at the border and told to return to camps in the cities
which they’d left seeking safety in their homelands. They felt they were entering
a state of limbo. It is bedlam in India
now “as the jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were.” They fear the danger of the virus but more
present is “looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police.” Four hundred and sixty million people have
been invisible to the prime minister as he makes his plan for the coming health
crisis. But she contends, “historically,
pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a
gateway from one world to the next.” I read
another essay in the wee hours this
morning by Rebecca Solnit. In it she refers to the pandemic as a spotlight that
illuminates underlying problems that will need to be addressed. She wrote, “In
theory, all of us are vulnerable to coronavirus, but in practice how well we fare
has to do with what you could call preexisting conditions that are not only
medical but economic social, political and racial – and the pandemic…has made
those differences glaringly clear.” Ordered to shelter in place begs the
question of what that sheltering looks like.
“What does a family of eight do in two rooms with a dirt floor, little
food on hand and no running water? Those who are in prison or other forms of
detention find that lack of freedom means lack of freedom to take the necessary
measures…some who live alone have been reporting devastating loneliness; people
who live with others have reported everything from exasperation to fear.” We have been telling ourselves that we are
getting wiser, kinder, fairer but maybe we are not there yet. We are
experiencing the tediousness of upending that children feel when parents
disappear, that a single mother knows when she gets cancer and loses her job,
that an inmate falls into when convicted for a crime he didn’t commit. I have
thought of the virus as a knife, dissecting the system and inviting us to cut out
what does not serve us. It resonates
with an Inuit metaphor that looked at predatory animals as a blade to strengthened
prey populations. This pandemic is like
an exploratory surgeon seeking the cancer. The social malignancies make us more
vulnerable and unstable. I want to
transform these metaphors into prayers, sending them out to work for the ones
they speak about and to. Let the new
world at Roy’s portal serve those Salt of the Earth people – the essential
wheels of our economic engines of the wealthy but still adolescent governments. Let the spotlight illuminate our path forward
so that we can take a new road. Let the
knife expose the paradox of truths within our natural world, that in order to
be healthy, a population must protect or sacrifice its most vulnerable. If sacrificed, let them be recognized as the champions
bringing us over a hard road to a fortified future and let that sacrifice be
made with eyes wide open. Amen!
Today’s
observation – How can we claim to be adults in more than age and reproductive cycle? The pandemic has exposed so much adolescent
proclivity to problem solving and development.
Teaching environmental science and the conundrums our societies have
raised with our policies and business plans make me question if we have more
adulting to do in our relationships with the earth and with other beings coexisting
here with us. It is true there are pin
pricks of mature judgement and policy shining intermittently among the life
choices and plans expressed in our culture and ecology. We can look across time and find pockets of
history, communities now that operate and cogitate with a mature consilience. And to borrow a phase from Brene Brown, we
could look at what the story is that we have been telling ourselves. Then how
do these times change or influence it? Can we step back and listen to more
voices of this crisis? Are we being heard? Is it more important to be right or
to be understood? Are we finding (even seeking) the vital messages that could open
us to the collaborations we need now? Maybe the virus is an agent of change, a
catalyst. As we connect with it, unavoidably
we are reshaped and able to reconsider the things we’ve taken for granted, able
to interface with the world a little differently. Perhaps the virus can make our hearts more
open, our concern more acute, our gratitude deeper, our patience a little
longer, our sense of self, kinder and broader.
We are crossing a field together, perhaps moving through a global and
cultural passage. This I pray - let us
emerge a little more adult than the way we have entered.
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