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Maybe this pandemic is a wake-up call to the world. It’s time to start looking outside the boxes of each of our own little minds and to start thinking on a bigger scale – as in the world. Sadly, it takes a crisis to shake up things and open our collective eyes.
Something I have never understood is how humans carry on in life as if none of our actions have consequences. As a ripple in the water, each of our actions – each thing that every one of us does as a human – has consequences. Yet we trundle along in our own little bubbles often not paying attention to all the ways we are so interconnected. We go to church, meditate, pray, contemplate the soul; yet we compartmentalize it. Once we’ve done our “spiritual duty” or not, we seem to miss the ways in which we are inextricably linked to other humans, nature, animals, and to the earth. When we are no longer in what we perceive as a holy place, we forget our responsibility; yet nature and the earth are the holiest of places. We count on each other to make wholesome and sustainable choices.
I was listening to National Public Radio just before the Corona Virus reached our shores.
What happened in a “Wet Market” in a province in China now affects all of us throughout the world. The slaughter of wildlife, particularly endangered wildlife, in China and parts of Africa, has huge consequences. Is this moment earth’s wake-up call?
A documentary I saw as a teen stunned and stayed with me. Koyaanisqatsi released in 1982 is a movie which consists of slow motion and time-lapse footage of cities and natural landscapes across the United States. In the Native American Hopi language the word means “life out of balance”. The film, part of a trilogy, depicts different aspects of the relationship between humans, nature, and technology. Its premise: we are living an unbalanced and unsustainable life. What makes the movie more powerful is the fact that there is no dialogue, or narration – only music and the juxtaposition of images.
Perhaps the virus has a kind of intelligence and is making its own correction. Maybe the earth is trying to tell us we must change our way of being. We need to embrace the ways we are connected to each other and to the earth.
A quote from one of my favorite poets, Maria Rainer Rilke, resonates for all of us today:
“for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.”
We are “here”.
Meredith Turner Chapman