Cataclysm

It’s funny to even pretend we’re counting, anymore. Most of us don’t. I can tell approximations because of my grey roots. Somehow, I don’t mind them as much, now. They seem trivial, at best.

It’s interesting how lessons are learned in life, isn’t it? One day, we’re going about our business and we hear echoes of something coming. We think it couldn’t be that bad. Doesn’t it seem like almost overnight, our normal played into some sort of weird, foggy dream? The kind you wake up from but it doesn’t seem that way because you seem to be vividly living it?

What’s been the biggest thing that’s shocked you? Are you shocked, anymore?

I began screenshooting the numbers in late March. I skipped a few days, then snapped every day, beginning the first full week in April. I’ve read far too many dystopian novels to not capture what was happening.

How are we all living in different realities? Or is this how it’s always been? My friends of color and my LGBTQ friends tell me it’s so. There have always been different worlds between us and them. Their treatment versus ours. The death makes it even more stark, now.

How do we have one reality-with nurses sharing their stories of six days straight and reusing their PPE, while they’re the only one holding someone’s hand as they die-a complete stranger?

How do we have another reality where people march in the streets saying,”you won’t tread on my liberties” and others proclaiming Bill Gates is trying to shoot them with a tracking vaccine?

How did we get to a place where Mother Earth was so mad that all it took for her to begin to heal was a month? A month of us just taking a time out, but looking at the photos-you can see her wounds and where she’s starting over, new. How did it only take a month?

How did we get to a place where a majority of our “essential workers” have never felt essential at all-most unable to afford to miss a day of work?

How do we have so many people who have worked their whole lives not able to save for a three month catastrophe?

How do we have our small businesses that create the heartbeat of a city, get turned down for help, while the man at the top who throws scraps, keep getting fed and fed and fed? They bleed dollars while leave us with none.

I only ask questions today, because I have no answers. I feel numb to it now. The death. The chaos-and the truth is-I’m not even in it. I’m fortunate enough to have my home and food and a job to go back to, but watching it all feels like the dystopian novel you read and think will never happen-but it did. It is.

I feel like we are at the brink of either deciding we’re in this thing, or we’re out. Our humanity. Our civility. Our ability to construct something from the broken. We’re broken right now and how do we make it out?

I’d love to know. Inside I feel myself being pulled between the anger and the decency.

I cry every time I see teachers do drive-bys with their students or people greeting nurses in song outside of hospitals. The ZOOM happy hours with friends you never see, the intimate conversations about deep love and reminders you find while cleaning out drawers of memories with your dad. I weep at the gratitude for these moments in the chaos that feel like light.

The daily briefings of blame and disbelief. The angry crowds of privileged people who’ve never really known what it’s like to be oppressed, at all. The selfishness. The dirty souls that will never get clean, no matter how much hand sanitizer they drink. The disconnect. The hardened hearts.

I want to scream,”go back home”, but I feel like if they liked their home or who they were inside, they wouldn’t really want to leave. They’d want to wrap up their frail grandmas or new babies and keep them safe, as long as they could stand it. They’d want more than anything to save them because that’s what love feels like to me.

When I finally turn off the filth at the end of the day and my eyes have seen enough-all I’m left with is the comfort of knowing that my heart always pulls me back to what I know is right and true.

The irony seems laughable when things are quiet and it seems so simple, now. I hate to assume the angry ones are the empty-hearted, but what else could explain it?

Buddha said,”you will not be punished FOR your anger, you will be punished BY your anger”.

Whatever the other side of this looks like, I hope this thing we cannot see, brings us to our knees. I think that’s the only way we’ll see the way up…

The floating days…

It’s day whatever, now. I’ve stopped counting. I believe I said this last time. Maybe it’s better that I’m still not counting.

Like everyone else, I vacillate between fear, sadness and peace. It’s the strangest mix of sensations in my mind and I’ve decided to let them all just be.

I’ve tried to rationalize in my brain, what’s to come of all this. What purpose it serves or what lesson we’re suppose to learn.

Since my nighttime schedule seems to have reverted back to me being the ever elusive night owl, I often find myself contemplating everything. Viruses, the meaning of our existence, how wine was first discovered…things that are really important.

Some of you might not know, but I’m a poetry junky. Herman Hesse, Thoreau and Emerson are some of my favorites. I think in some strange way, it’s interesting and emblematic to listen to men pour their tortured souls out.

As we spend time indoors and by consequence, our air qualities are improving, water is becoming clear in lakes and rivers and animals are finding their homes again, I can’t help but think Mother Nature has purposefully intended this virus, all along.

“That would be cruel”, you might think-but if you look back on our history and the writers who understood the power of nature, you might see how our own arrogance had us clandestine for this.

Emerson didn’t believe our ultimate goal was to be happy, but to be purposeful in our work. He also believed that for us to separate ourselves from nature was to separate ourselves from God. In nature, we find the beast and the heaven and we, too, have that in us.

I wish this didn’t come back to politics and money, for me, but I think it does for all of us.

The currency of our lifeblood as humans is almost non-existent. As they say in Fight Club,”we buy things we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t even like”. Why?

If the rich man has no family but all the money and the poor man has no money but all the family-who would really have died with more wealth? At the end of your life, does your money hold your hand when you die?

Aren’t we witnessing that now? No matter who you are, right now, if you get this virus, you aren’t surrounded by your family. People are dying alone. Is there a chance that this is what we’re suppose to see? That the people we love at the end of our life are the only thing we really want. None of us want to die alone.

That’s what the poets are always trying to convey.

I never understood that until I went to Montana the first time. I honestly thought I was a beach girl my entire life but my girlfriend kept trying to convince me this would be different.

I had never been on vacation by myself but somehow she convinced me to come for nine days. Nine days. Holy shit. In the woods. For nine days. What would I do in the mountains for NINE DAYS?!?

For those of you that know me, you understand my love for Montana. It is my idea of heaven-and when I say that, I don’t say it lightly. It is the most transcendent place I have ever seen.

I remember the first time I went to Glacier National Park and I kayaked in a beautiful river with a giant mountain behind me and I sat there for a moment and I was paralyzed with awe. I sobbed like a baby. For the first time in my life, I felt completely out of my own body and I realized how insignificant I was. I realized that I was insignificant and enormous, all at the same time.

That’s the basis for our being and I pray, that’s the lesson we’ll learn from all of this. We are this collective, beautiful, chaotic experiment floating around and our only purpose is to love and learn from each other. That’s it. It’s that simple.

As humans, we’re really good at complicating everything. We all spend time worrying and stressing about things we can’t control. We spend time with people we don’t like and do things that never light our soul on fire.

When I look at what’s happened to us, I feel so, so sad. We’ve become a nation that is driven by rhetoric and ego and somehow it’s bought and sold like a commodity needed to exist. But it isn’t. Because those things break us. They move us away from who and what we were called to be. If we are all an extension of God, isn’t it our job to listen to the lessons laying at our feet? If this isn’t a flare gun shot to the face, begging us to wake up-I don’t know what is.

One of my favorite quotes is from Thoreau and I still carry this around in my wallet as a reminder…

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…”

What are you living for? Sure-we’re all going to the store deliberately-but are you loving that way? What will you take away from this? Will you kiss your loved one longer? Will you hug tighter? Will you be more purposeful in your work? Will you help those that have nothing when you have so much? Will you do a better job of taking care of the earth? Will you take better care of your body? Will you be a good neighbor and accepting of everyone?

Where will you stand, when this is done…if you’re standing at all?