One Day's Journey from Fear to Resilience

 After a couple days of being under the weather, I decided to catch up on what is going on in the world. Now that I was feeling better, it was time to engage more broadly than the surroundings of my own cozy little home. But oh my, it was such a downer! The world news flattened my spirit. Then I got a call from my daughter April. She and her family survived the terrible devastation of Asheville recently. She called from an emergency shelter where she and her son Gus were volunteering to distribute food and water and other necessities to the surrounding population there. And she told me how the wonderful FEMA volunteers helping out after that severe crisis were getting attacked by right wing fanatics, forcing them to leave the area. There were hateful, ugly, scurrilous things being said about people just trying to do the best thing they knew. 

And listening to the wider news, I was yet again saddened and angered by the lies, lack of morality, the heedless disregard for one's fellow humans that is becoming commonplace in today's political scene. I retreated to my comfortable recliner and decided to watch a film about the life of elephants. Maybe they could teach us about how to care for each other. But again it laid me flat, for it told of how humanity has forced them into smaller and smaller habitats, and likely they will disappear from the earth. I don't mind saying that after all this, my first day up from being sick, I was really really depressed. How are we supposed to be OK when the world around us seems to be falling apart? I knew that other people seem to have energy to work for the best, but at that point I was too discouraged to see beyond the bad stuff.

I knew that going out into Nature was what I needed to do. Try to connect with something deeper and broader than the world of people. Maybe I could get some perspective and some inspiration there. It's easy to feel small and fallible and powerless with the world in such trouble. So I went to my favorite park and sat in a little one-person shelter surrounded by prairie and forest. I watched the wind blowing through the grasses, the birds flying overhead, the clouds drifting further above. No ready answers came. But it was good to widen my perspective, feeling the life of the wild living planet around me. I let myself imagine I was out in space, looking down, seeing this earth from a distance, seeing its history. Such a long, long history with epoch after epoch when the earth adjusted to changing conditions. And I gratefully felt my place as a tiny spark of humanity among billions of other life forms here, just a single being but connected to everything. All of us living for a little while as time flows on. 

And with this wider perspective, the present drama we humans have created here seemed just a blip on the screen. Even though we try to imagine ourselves being masters of the universe, we're in fact very, very small in the lens of time. The turbulence we're creating may well change our home enough so we can't live here any longer. Yet while I held my focus on the whole, on the miraculous web of life here, I could breathe deep, my fear blown away, my resilience emerging. Yes, it is a tough time. The human experiment here is in trouble. Our species has some vulnerabilities that threaten to drown us: greed, aggression, separation from our earth mother. But the earth will go on., epoch after epoch. As if it were a huge beautiful being, it's gradually recovered from things in the past that have threatened it. And it will again. If our species can't find a way to change, it will go on without us. It will evolve and survive. In the meantime, we need not lose heart. We can evolve and survive too, if we can manage to do it before it's too late. And if not, we've had a good run. If reincarnation really happens, I think I'd like to come back as a tree.