What was the moment it all turned? And is it a dead end?

Thanksgiving dinner was very strange last year.  For some reason my family couldn’t gather, and there was this tiny cluster of us having a meal together while the rest of the tribe ended up celebrating somewhere else.  In retrospect it had an ominous feel to it.

But it wasn’t the only strange thing happening in the universe right then.

According to some obsessive timeline collectors, it was right about Thanksgiving that labs in France, Italy and Brazil were shocked to see some variety of coronavirus appearing in sewage samples they were taking in city water systems. At that point there had been no sign of the disease but it appears to have already burbled up from human sewage in multiple parts of the globe. 

In fact, the virus had shown up in Spain in early spring.  Here’s a pretty comprehensive timeline kept on Wikipedia:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic

WHO did an early timeline, but stopped updating it in June:  https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/27-04-2020-who-timeline—covid-19

Here’s a timeline from USA Today that may still be updated:  https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/nation/2020/04/21/coronavirus-updates-how-covid-19-unfolded-u-s-timeline/2990956001/

Then it appeared as deadly disease in a meat market.  I note that as a vegetarian, but that it appears in slaughtered flesh seems appropriate.  The bats hosted it, but the virus was watching for a place of death to reach out to the humans.

What switch got triggered in 2019?  Of all the egregious things the human race has done to Mother Earth in the last 500 years, what was the final straw that made her say “THAT’S IT! This species has just gone too far?”

It’s a rhetorical question of course.  The thoughts and affairs that occupy that great body Mama Earth are in a realm we aren’t privy to.  But suddenly it matters.  Lots more than we used to think. 

Our culture isn’t set up to discern these things quickly.  The authoritarian streak we’ve indulged all these centuries has dulled our ability to critic our activities, and the economic system we built based on those authoritarian values only notices profit and loss.  So we’re caught in this muddle and can’t quite get out of it.

But my mind keeps going back there.  The great awareness that is Mama Earth writhing with an aggressive skin disease that keeps getting worse.  It starts as a little itch but grows and festers and deepens.  Some busy little critter she’d only been mildly and lovingly interested in are burrowing down and dredging up ancient black layers she labored long and hard to bury.  And they use it for the most destructive thing possible – they burn it.  The sweet, pure air that is her breath clogs with the choking excess.  She labors diligently to soak up the poison through her plant life and oceans confident, as she has always been, that the vast, complex and finely tuned life systems she created in her wisdom will be able to contain this peculiar malady.  But the odd little creatures just keep thinking of more destructive things to do.  And they seem to be proliferating wildly!

500 years is such a short time from an earth perspective.  It’s nothing.   How could we have muddled into this worst possible of scenarios so quickly and so blindly?  Of course, it’s because our eyes are shut.  We can’t see. The moment has come to open our eyes and see who we really are. 

If we want to be the aware, conscious, meaning-making species that we imagine ourselves to be its time to wake up and be aware and conscious, and make the meaning of our lives splendid.  We do not need to be the bed bugs of Mother Earth.  We can become her fine raiment and participate fully and richly in the life of this our home planet, if we are awake enough to do it.

That requires something of us.  The beginning of it is to be aware that the values we found our thinking on have already changed.  We are no longer beings who must live in an authoritarian culture to survive.  We – none of us — need a master.  I’m not sure we ever did, but some appear to think so.  Those days are over.  It’s up to us individually and collectively to celebrate the gift of life and move into our rightful heritage as children of the Earth.  Together as one human species honoring the networks of life and our planet home as stewards instead of destroyers.  In the core of our true selves we know how to do that.  By embracing the awareness of it we can heal from this authoritarian malady and embody life with joy and peace.  The alternative is not worth thinking about.