Dear Friends of Inside Passages,
As we move more deeply into the uncharted waters of the Covid 19 pandemic, my heart is with you all, and with the many people who are facing profound challenges to their health and livelihoods during this tumultuous time.
I do not want to minimize in any way the profound level of suffering that this pandemic has unleashed on our global human community. But I am also struck by the many stories of healing connections that I am hearing from friends and family during a difficult time of enforced “sheltering in place”. For those of us fortunate enough to have a place to shelter, the opportunity this has given us to slow down, connect more intimately with our close loved ones, and reflect more deeply than usual on our core priorities, has been an unexpected gift, one that gets scant attention on the daily news.
It is almost as if the universe has orchestrated an “intervention” into the epidemic of busyness, distraction and polarization that had become rampant in our culture. As one of my friends likes to say, we have been “way out over our skis”, barreling down the mountain so completely out of control that we could no longer avoid a serious pile up. The Covid 19 pandemic could be seen as that slow motion pile up, one we didn’t see coming, that will change the ways we live moving forward from here in ways we cannot yet fully anticipate. It will impact each of us differently. But our ability to adapt to these changes will depend on how courageously we are willing to re-think the assumptions and life patterns that got us so far out over our skis to begin with.
So in the midst of pandemic, I want to highlight a few of the things we might learn from this strange new messenger.
The Gift of Slowing Down. For now we have almost no choice but to suspend our addiction to busyness. It is disorienting, but potentially liberating as well. So many of us have become habituated to a life in which there is no time to think, no time to reflect, no time to stop and listen. We feel constantly stressed, rushing headlong through our days, as if we have no control and no choice in the matter. What if the Coronavirus has just handed us back that key to the prison of time poverty we have built around ourselves?
The Gift of Retreat. During a time of enforced self-quarantine, what if we chose to embrace it as a mindfulness retreat? This may not be literally possible if we have young children at home, but we can build a spirit of retreat into the open time we now have been given. We can revivify our practice of meditation or yoga if we have one. We can take springtime walks and really pay attention to what we are seeing, hearing and smelling. We can read some of the important books we have neglected for lack of time, play games with our children and loved ones, tell stories and really listen to the telling, all with a degree of spaciousness we may have forgotten was possible. This morning, as I sat outside in my morning meditation for the first time in awhile, a winter wren landed on a branch in front of me, and literally exploded in song. The song washed over me and brought joy to my heart. How many moments like this have I missed because I was too busy to make time for my practice?
A Respite for the Natural World. It is easy to forget that the non-human world may be experiencing this “crisis” quite differently than we are. Here on Whidbey Island, in the Salish Sea, in the far NW corner of the US, spring is coming on just like always. The migratory birds at change of light are filling the air with song. What is different is the unusual degree of clarity in the air. The sky on sunny days is a startling blue, the snow-covered Olympic and Cascade mountains are crystal clear across the water, because the normal air pollution from everyday rush hour traffic has temporarily halted. It is as if the biosphere itself has been granted a rare opportunity to take a deep, restorative breath. This is happening all over the planet at the same time as we take a planet-wide break from business as usual. The decades-long pall of air pollution has cleared in the skies above Beijing in China. Dolphins have returned to the canals of Venice, Italy, for the first time in recent memory. With all the pain and suffering in the human world at this moment, can we open to the larger arc of healing that may be embedded in this crisis?
The Gift of Self-Healing. Maybe more important than anything on a personal level, in the huge uncertainty of this moment, is the chance to see more clearly the fog banks of fear and anxiety blowing through my own mind. By seeing it clearly, and having the time to face it honestly, I can more quickly transform my reactivity into response, reclaiming the freedom from fear that is the great gift of our practice. I can own what is mine to mend, and reign in my tendencies to send it outward into the world as unexamined anger or blame.
I can choose kindness instead.
May we all be safe and protected and strong in the face of fear.
In friendship,
Kurt