Most of our Kossacks write about the goings on in the daily circus of politics, which is important, but every now and then someone writes from the heart about themselves and their life. The recent blog by BoiseBlue "I’m on day ‘everything makes me cry’ of the stay at home orders” was one, and so deep and honest — thank you so much Boise! — it led me to respond with how I feel, with a different way to understand this amazing time. There are many ways to be and to live with our Covid-19 separations; we each have own own, and they are all true. We live the stories we create about ourselves and the world. This is a story that helps me make sense of the daily flow of this crazy time, which can otherwise seem like just random madness.
We have been living with the unraveling of western civilization for many years. This is a huge transition; maybe as momentous as anything humans have experienced since we settled down and started raising food, because literally everything is changing, and at the same time. For most of my life, I have been trying to do my part to hold onto peace, justice, and our beautiful planet, always with more losses than gains, always in anger and pain, always trying to find hope. I have shed a river of tears for the forests ravaged, for the wolves caught in traps, for the rivers and skies and lands polluted, for people torn by war and hunger and fear. We all have; it is what it has been to be human and awake the last seventy years.
It took me a long time, and with the help of the deep mythologist Michael Meade, to finally understand that, yes, everything really is unraveling, it is all coming apart — and this must happen for us to build the more beautiful world that is coming into being.
This feels like the apocalypse, and it is. Not in the way some imagine: the world isn’t going to end, it never does (if you were alive at Y2K and are reading this, well, there you go), and it won’t this time around. But the original meaning of apocalypse is something like “to reveal, to lift the veil.” This chaos is what is necessary, to see through this world and get glimpses of the new one ahead.
As Michael so wisely describes, when the end feels near, so is the beginning. www.facebook.com/… Both of these are happening at the same time: all the institutions that we once relied on (and that we now see served only the rich and powerful) are showing they are not adequate for the new world. Old religion, the government, financial and educational systems, medical systems, our very notions of the family, are all crumbling, all at the same time! And at the same time, new systems to replace those are slowly coming into being . There is so much beauty, joy, love and creativity awake and moving across the land: how can we be anything other than hopeful?! Watching the three days of Earth Day streaming has so lifted my spirits, seeing so many confident, courageous, already wise young people going about and doing what needs to be done. Yes!
There have always been rites of passage/initiations for people going through momentous transitions; Michael Meade speaks to this and it helps me to think of Covid-19 this way. The first step is always a separation — well, don’t you know, we are all doing that part. The next stage is some kind of ordeal, of sacrifice. Many, many people are putting their lives at risk for the rest of us, the ultimate sacrifice, and BoiseBlue speaks so beautifully to the sacrifices the rest of us are making by being separated from those we love. Not from the mall and the golf course, but from nature and from the human connections that have always been central to what it means to be fully human. It is so important that we not rush through the separation; yes, it is hard and uncomfortable, but we really need to give it time to work us so we are really connected to what we need to learn.
The final stage of initiation is to return to the community bearing the gifts we have found while we were away. My experience, and the reports of so many others, show that what we have learned and can bring back is a real feeling — not just left-brain understanding — but a knowing of how interconnected we are, to the Earth that sustains us, to all the people on this planet, our communities, and to our families. This is what is important: all the rest — greed and power — are the noise of the old world as it dies away. Make no mistake, the old world has tremendous power, tremendous energy, and it is not giving way easily, let alone gracefully. And it may get worse before it gets better. If we don't get the message this time, next time it will be a whole lot worse ( we have a nutcase with his finger on the nuclear trigger, in our own country.) But make no mistake about it, the old world is dying, and a more beautiful world is being born. May we each do our part in this dire and beautiful time.