Living with Uncertainty and other teachings of Corona

 Our country is getting more and more polarized over the Coronavirus.  I was amused when Donald Trump's press secretary first spoke of alternative facts.  What an oxymoron.  But now like living into a science fiction movie, there are people on both sides of the divide furious with the other side for doing what they regard to be life threatening or life worth living threatening behaviors. There is no way for them to even discuss the "facts" of the issue because they have different news sources and literally different facts.  In my clinical practice I listen to families that are being torn apart by these differences, and literally to people moving to other states, so they can either live where people are vaccinated, or live where they do not have to wear masks.

My last blog about the virus I said "well clearly Corona is not done teaching us.  We are still being held still in order to learn."  But I was getting pretty tired and board myself with that.   It was easy to just feel like "I wish those other people would hurry up and learn so we can get out of purgatory."  That is never a good position when you stop noticing what you might need to be learning.

Recently while talking to one of my clients - I noticed that all of us, both sides are grasping desperately for certainty, for normalcy.  One side grasp for an end through vaccination and herd immunity, the other grasps to maintain a freedom of choice and the normalcy that comes with that.  It occurred to me that through out time humans have looked for and made up explanations for the scary and unexplained thing in their time.  Ancient people explained earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes as the God's were angry with the people.  A previous generation believed the earth was flat because that was what they could see and the idea it was round felt like we could "fall off".  In a pandemic gone by people not knowing about germs and how they spread believed that whole towns fell ill because witches communed with the Devil.  There is a long list of things that without understanding the science, people made up explanations for.   Actually part of how our brains are literally wired is to fill in missing pieces of info to make sense.  If you print a word without a vowel most people will substitute it and not even know they did.

We don't want uncertainty.  It is uncomfortable; it feels scary.  We feel better with an explanation even if it is as horrible as one of our neighbors is a witch who has turned the whole town over to the Devil.

What arises for me out of this - especially if Corona is here as our spiritual teacher, is how do we learn to live with uncertainty?   It seems to me it requires quite a bit of faith, a belief in a Supreme being who is weighing in for good.  It means learning how to live inside the Serenity prayer.  It means having to surrender the desire for certainty and big T truths.  It means embracing the mystical which is the unknown and trusting being on a journey.  It means not turning away from the suffering which is part of the unknown experience we are having.  It means having to learn to respond with compassion and find hope from within.

Covid is still teaching

When the pandemic first started I felt fairly clear about its connection to spirit - it seemed it had come to teach us to slow down, to connect again to the earth - and so with that I felt a certain peace about it.  (See past 6 posts).  But as the pandemic continues on, and on, and on, and on with no apparent end in sight, I like so many grow weary.   I am sad that we cannot learn better and prevent so many deaths.  I grieve for all the people who have lost loved ones, and how have lost jobs.  I'm saddened for the young people who graduate without graduations, or cannot start schools or careers or even hold a marriage ceremony.

As I start to notice that it is about impossible to start anything or even complete anything for that matter, I begin to puzzle at Spirits intention for the length of this?  Have we not slowed down enough?   My daughter wrote an amazing poem about the 6 feet of distance, and the 6 degrees of separation and the ways in which these two things teach us that we are all intricately connected to each other.   https://www.facebook.com/sara.grendon/videos/3637330776281070

As I complained to a Friend about the endless of this experience she replied: apparently we are not done learning.  And I realized she is right.  If we are suppose to learn that everyone on the planet is intimately connected to all other lives - tethered in a web of life to which we all depend and to which we all impact....then we have not yet learned it.   The masks are not to protect ourselves but to protect others and yet we cannot yet embrace that we have a sacred responsibility to each other to protect each other.  Some people are still working on the chapter of believing that science is truth - still struggling how to know that this experience is true.  But for the vast majority that believe it true we still have yet to learn how to honor our connection to each other.

So I guess we shall be held neither moving forward or backwards till we can learn that we are all connected.

Spirit Message for the Pandemic

I have previously on a different blog written about a prayer practice I have of offering up a question in prayer and then opening various spiritually meaningful books and receiving their answer.   A while back I did this asking God:  What would you have me know about this pandemic?  The answers below speak to me of viewing the pandemic as a spiritual event, of examining how we live in the world, understanding the dying which is happening more now, as part of a cycle of life and death that is part of the human experience, how to face our own potential mortality and that of those we love.

Below are the messages I received:
From the Book Emmanuel II: "As you learn to perceive with an open heart, what seems to be taking place on the physical plane of your world, it becomes time to speak.  What? Anything your heart tells you.  To whom?  Anyone who will listen.  The moment you speak from love and not from fear, you assume the mantle of leadership..your responsibility is to hear your own hear.  this is a schoolroom for learning how to love what appears to be absolutely unloveable."

From Thomas Kelly in a Testament of Devotion  There is an experience of the Eternal breaking into time, which transforms all life into a miracle of faith and action.  Unspeakable, profound, and full of glory as an inward experience, it is the root of concern for all creation, the true ground of social endeavor. This inward Life and the the outward concern are truly one whole and were it possible, ought to be described simultaneously.

The Prophet by Kilbran  The section of Freedom
"You shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care or your nights without a want and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.

The Book of Emmanuel I: the door that unlocks the soul into incarnation can fufill many purposes; teaching others ass well as self.  When a life is designed to serve both ends then the cause and the call are magnificent.  At those times, the higher wisdom can say "And this is necessary now". ....Can a soul learn from a type of fear so pervasive that there is no space for understanding?  The soul can learn.  Perhaps the human being cannot.

Wayne Dyer The Power of Intention:
With self as a focal point, you sustain the illusion that you are your body, which is a completely seperate entity from all others.  This sense of separateness leads you to compete rather than cooperate.  Ultimately its a "no-match" with Spirit, and becomes a huge obstacle to your connection to the power of Source. 

Michael Singer The Untethered Soul.
This is how negative cycles happen.  You actually take a piece of your stuff, which is nothing but deeply seated disturbance from your past, and you implant it in the heart of those around you. ...This is how people ruin relationships and destroy their lives.   Do you doubt that a single blockage getting hit in your heart could case a fall that lasts a lifetime?  I has been known to happen...when a block gets hit, its a good thing.  It's time to open up internally and release the block energy.

If you fall along the way, just get up and forget it.  Use the lessons to strengthen your resolve.  Let go right then.  Do not rationalize, blame, or try to figure it out.  Don't do anything.  Just let go immediately, and allow the energy to go back to the highest center of consciousness it can achieve.

Who Am I?

Who am I? is an exercise in the Alternatives to Violence Project three day workshops on non-violence.  In the exercise, on 10 tiny slips of paper one lists all of the "identities" that one identifies with.   Eg: Mother, therapist, Quaker, woman, activist, etc.    Then one places them in order of importance with least important on the bottom.  Then you are invited to turn the pile over taking the least important one and "throw it away" - feeling into what it would be like to no longer have that identity.  Then you throw away the next one, sensing into that.....and so it continues.  The instructor manual warns to leave people with 3 identities and only suggest they could release the final 3 if it felt right to do that.

This is an exercise I did dozens and dozens of times in my time as an AVP facilitator.  As the pandemic swept in bringing the ban on travel to and from Europe, and stay in place recommendations and then orders....as events cancelled ranging at first from long distance travel and conferences to events over 100, and eventually....EVERYTHING, I found myself in a life size game of Who am I.
First releasing my vacation trip, then the conference for 180 people I had planned for months for the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, then a workshop to be given in Portland, and then Friends General Conference and the workshop I was to give there.  Later even more painfully I would surrender the local Earthday parade: Procession of the Species, and FolkLife - a Memorial Day weekend of fun I have attended every year for 32 years without fail.

I was sort of surprised how easily the identities/expectations fell, although some were harder than others.  But there was simply a feeling of falling into a new world, an alternative reality in which none of those things existed and where nothing involving human contact existed.  In the liminal space which I had entered where everything and anything (both bad, unexpected and even good in a new way) seemed possible - these old identifies seemed almost irrelevant.

Since then I have listened to a number of people who have service identities who have been unable to serve in their accustomed ways because of stay at home orders, talk about how hard it feels to not be able to help, but even more strange how lost they feel without that role (identity).  As it so happens I believe that it is deep in our DNA in response to crisis to help others - this after all from our first tribal time was how we survived.  And it is the thing I most detest about this crisis - that its very nature forces us to go against the instinct to help.   However, when serving other people goes from being an impulse to an identity - one which one is profoundly uncomfortable with, than perhaps something else is actually happening.  Many people are also having to release the identify of "busy" which for many is also a defining identity and find new experiences of how to be connected to other people - both the ones under their roof and the ones they cannot see in person.   We are being forced to find other ways of both entertaining and exercising ourselves - ways more simple and perhaps basic to original human existence.

Some people talk about when things go back to normal.   I hope they don't; I hope we will learn some things from this gigantic game of Who Am I.   As was always the case with Who Am I there is the opportunity as you throw away external identities to find, or notice again, ones own more core spiritual identify and to discover the eternal nature of the soul that is always with us underneath the external wrapping.   To know more deeply who we really are.

The Corona Virus and Climate Change

So here we are suddenly thrust into a Pandemic.  Living in circumstances none of us could imagine even a month ago when the epidemic was sweeping China and Iran, etc.  We are living a crisis of a type that has not happened in any living person's memory (100 years since the last pandemic).   We are living a nightmare in someways made worse by how much of a global community technology has made us.  (100 years ago people did not fly in hours from one place to another.)

As I have been doing Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects for 10 years I cannot help but see this catastrophe through that lens designed to help us face "the Mess we are in without going Crazy" or with Active Hope (the title of her last book).   It feels to me like sharing some of these thoughts would be helpful to others as well.

As someone who has been doing climate work now for 13 years I have been long been staring down grim scenarios for humanity and our planet.  The worst case scenarios all involve the total breakdown of society as the environment itself fails.  Logically there is a terrible economic fall out of such scenarios and the breakdown of various societal structures, but even the worst case scenarios did not see things like that happening for 10 to 15 years.  Some of those scenarios also envisioned old epidemics literally rising out of the permafrost or no longer enough vaccinations to suppress.

But what is actually happening is a scenario no one but a science fiction writer envisioned and would appear unrelated to Climate Change.  Yet Joanna's words still powerfully apply for me.  She has talked for a long time about non-linear time, the idea coming forth from quantum mechanics of parallel time, and she has said: our ancestors and our descendants are trying to help us, and the non human beings.  I had the dawning realization the first time I listened to her "why do I think all the solutions will come from the minds of humans living right now?"   During the sHell No campaign in the NW in 2015 - Kayactvists tried to stop Shell from parking a rig in Seattle and going up to Alaska and testing to drill off the coast of Alaska, and activists hung off a bridge in Portland to stop the ice breaker coming for repair.  I had several experiences then that felt powerfully to speak about what Joanna was speaking of.

The rig alluded the two dozen Kayactivists trying to block it in Seattle but by the time it got across from Port Townsend some Kayactivists - only 4 or 5 came out and it swerved slightly to miss them and ground.  It was only stuck a short time, but I felt as if the earth had reached up and grabbed it!  I felt as if the earth were trying to help.   Later, the ice breaker was damaged (apparently by ice) and had to be brought down to Portland for repairs...causing delay. (Again I felt the frozen ocean had reached up ripping the ice breaker and helping us.) It was further delayed as it left by activists hanging on ropes from the bridge blocking their path and by kayactivts that also darted out and blocked their path. That whole delay only took two days, but added to the time lost on the repair and Shell wound up not having enough time to do their test drilling and without that info their board cancelled the whole project (partly also aware of the negative public outcry.)  In the end I felt the earth had puts its finger on the scale and helped ups to win that battle.

For those of you very scientific this account will drive you mad.   This is a spiritual story.  It is a story of how beings from another time are conspiring on behalf of all life to save us.

What you say does this have to do with the Coronovirus?  Well I want to be clear I am not celebrating anyone's death.  I am not oblivious to the untold suffering that the virus is bringing by stopping the global economy in its tracks....but I will say this: look at a list of the industries currently in a tail spin:
airlines, the oil industry, cruise ships, the financial industry....all of these are leading contributors to climate change.  We are literally seeing as the flying and way less driving is happening as people are compelled to stay home the green house gases reducing and the deep smog over China lifting.  The eco system has produced a virus that is both reducing the population of the beings in charge of climate change and it is also changing our most climate destroying behaviors. 

Sure when the epidemic is over people will go back to flying and driving and spending money....but maybe just maybe we will begin to realize that much more telecommuting could normally occur, that it is crazy to fly across the country for a convention where we listen to a talking head that we could easily have listened to on a screen.   Maybe we will think twice about flying across many states to go to a sports game or watch a play.  Maybe we can hold flying a privilege for weddings and funerals and to see the dying.   Maybe we will learn how quickly we can change policies when we really KNOW we are in an emergency (she says with the anger of being told for three years that we will protect the trees next session or being told by portfolio managers that they know oil will become a stranded asset put policy prohibits divesting from it.)  Maybe in the ashes of this mess we will decide we might as well reconstruct things in a way that will survive climate change.  Maybe just maybe we can learn from this experience about the way we have been living and how we need to live.

Joanna Macy is a whole systems thinker.  One of the "games" she has us do in workshops to illustrate systems theory involves each of us secretly picking two people in the group of 20.  When we say go you are to place yourself equadistantly from those two as the group moves (that can be in a line or a triangle).  The group keeps moving and moving trying to establish this perfect equilibrium.  Then one predesignated person drops to the ground and the facilitator says: if you are connected to someone on the ground you must drop too.  Within seconds the entire group is on the ground.  This is a powerful lesson that we are all connected to each other in the web of life.   This is why the moment the ban on travel to Europe was  announced I knew our economy was going down.   I knew it would force airlines into bankruptcy, that as they lessened flights other things would go wrong, etc.  I knew that as we restricted movement in order to stop the spread of the virus that it would stop economic activity and close businesses, many forever.  This is the painful side of the generally beautiful truth that we are all connected to each other.

It is also why it is so important for how we now respond to this.  It we act as every person for themselves we will create a hell.  Like the person who knew they had the Covi-19 and flew on a Jet Blue plane anyway exposing every person on that plane.  An unbelievably selfish act destroying the web they belong to.   But I also see people right now reaching out to get groceries and meds for those who cannot do it, and trying to figure out how to help those who are becoming unemployed over night. Several NBA players responded to the cancelling of their season by donating to replace the incomes for the season of the minimum wage janitors and hotdog sellers, etc. associated with the stadium.   We are all payed millions, but how can we help those who are struggling right now?

History is full of crises.  Crises that pivoted us as a people in a good way and crises that pivoted us in a bad way.  Example - the poor resolution of WWI leading to economic hardship in Germany made ripe the rise of Hitler promising a new bright future for Germany.  The worldwide recession was responded to by Roosevelt in a transformational way of creating social security, public works projects, unemployment insurance, etc.   We will choose what comes out of this crisis.  We can let the rich use it to snap up even more resources or we can recreate a society that provides universal health care, sick leave and maternity leave for all, and that begins to really seriously address climate change.  Some may find what I say to be an incredible tale of silver linings or fairy tales.  But we are the ones who will decide what the final outcome of this story will be.