Breathe like a sleeping tiger,
like a fish, like butterfly wings.
Intimate terrorism, they call it;
Domestic violence.
Tigers sick with Coronavirus –
What are we supposed to do ?
It is easier to read the news than it is
To watch the moon travel across the sky
Yet we gather with tragic optimism
And dance with nothing to lose
Now is the time to live the We
Though ironically, alone.
…
Next year in Jerusalem will be better.
We have to remember, he said, every number is a human being and a family, and here we are putting those bodies in trucks in parking lots. This virus is good at what it does — killing vulnerable people. A traffic jam of stretchers lines the hall. Many of the coffins are made of cardboard.
“The gap between the ideal and the merely real, although wide, could become much closer for you at this time. Something new, deep inside you, is coming into birth, and you are learning how to reside with the uncertainty of it all. The superior man, in accordance with this, fearlessly stands alone, and stays retired from the world without regret.”
Like this we fearlessly stand alone, and stay retired from the world without regret.
“Post traumatic growth” doesn’t mean that people should endure adversities with a smiling face. When we speak of becoming better in this time, it is important to note that the tragic optimism of Victor Frankl, himself a Holocaust survivor, is not the same thing as happiness. Optimism means breathing in the pain, and then, breathing it back out again, waiting for the new breath.
Get yourself in a fixed routine like the orbiting planets, this is what the teachers say. Be total.
Meanwhile the Republicans are trying to block mail-in voting options because they will fundamentally alter the nature of the election; meaning, it will get more people involved who usually do not vote, people who may be disenfranchised for one reason or another, people who would support more social welfare and equality measures, basically people who are sane, also known as Democrats. In moments it is scary to see the ideological fissures in America today, and how clearly they seem descendent from the sides of the Civil War, still embedded today. The idea that it is okay, that some people are slaves in society, and receive different rights and benefits, while others make profit at their expense.
How does this happen, he asks?
I believe it is a question of humility.
(Like this our public servants are forced to the front page, forced onto the stage, forced to identify themselves to their public and be leaders not just of policy, but of spirit)
This is a wave, of people, dependent upon people, dependent upon people, and they all end up getting squeezed. Even the ones on Wall Street will feel it, eventually. The revenue source is drying up. We need to find a way, to refill the well, in the midst of this collapsing security.
Your industry doesn’t work anymore — because your industry wasn’t taking into account your foundation — your health and the environment. In all honesty, if you look at the facts, like climate change statistics, what did you expect? Was the earth also your slave? Did you think that you owned her? Now being Green becomes Alpha, becomes necessary. Human health and the economy go hand in hand. Humanity’s instinctive compassion is to heal, and like this we must.
The Queen says we will meet again and drink tea together.
Someone is playing French horn in the park… amongst people playing frisbee, many of whom look like they have never played frisbee. In this time of exponential change we are forced into emotion over cognition, innovation in economy itself. We must address system level risks — like global pandemics, inequality, climate change — these are the issues to solve. Innovation is faster than ever before in human history — this is an area where we can benefit. Amplified together, we have the solve/benefit tailwind.
Details are the lifeblood of better theories, so update your priors and identify the real risks, like resource degradation. In the midst of this crisis how can you not see that inequality is actually a risk? We are in a Both-And dynamic which requires behavioral plasticity. Now we are being asked to learn how to function differently. It is a headwind that gets all of us in this time of massive change and disruption. When risks confront us it brings about the best in our innovators, policy makers, in ourselves, and also the worst. All of the areas of the economy that are plummeting are the ones that were unsustainable to begin with. Let us electrify the world by investing in change. Be honorable and humble, respect the patient capital. It is important to stick to a thesis, and that is that we desire to be sustainable.
Volatility is not going to slow down, so let us move with care. Let us measure our sense of value, with our expectations for growth. Own the solution. Refuse to own the causes of system level threats. Care about the fundamental risk. Invest to sustain our ecosystems. These things are no longer the future, they are now.
There is a wise man who says: We often hear about the beauty of America. And this is an incredibly beautiful country. So let us keep it that way. Let us stand here in solidarity.
Be responsible, because that is the Right Way. The life you risk may not be your own. It’s not about going back, it’s about going forward. There is no return to normal; we can’t return to yesterday. If we’re smart we achieve a NEW Normal, in terms of our economy, the environment, public health. How small the world has gotten. Someone sneezes in Asia today and gives you a cold in New York tomorrow. Now there is no distinction between me and we anyway. We are already We.
Now is the time to focus on convergent and additive professions. We are looking for the Perfect Fit.
Why was this not a priority before?
Here in this virtual online court system, can you tell the truth? Can we tell what is true, when we can’t hear another person breathing, or smell them across the room? Is it really just about the facts? How much does that make us slave to our technologies, rather than our senses? Here we are in the imperfect real world, being demanded to make do, even if that’s not what we want to do. I always thought the idea of getting a virtual medical physical negated the entire point of visiting a health care professional, someone you could see in flesh and blood, who could see my flesh and blood. But maybe in this we simply need to pay more attention to our own condition, give more clear answers to better questions. Even though I still don’t think that testing is necessary the Final Solution. I’d place my money on building up a concept of overall immune building. It’s like lifting weights, but with health. Requires intelligence, and discipline.
The poorest people pay the highest price in these circumstances, and he ask, why is that? Public workers who don’t have a choice, except on a certain level, in some cases, people also made that choice. You can’t take that from them. Some preferred a life outdoors, as opposed to one in a cubical, even if it did place them next to a factory, at least it wasn’t in one. Even though most are inside, without a choice. Maybe they are still more human that the rest of those animals living in their self-enclosed cages typing on screens. Maybe they are living and learning real human things, which doesn’t always come with the longest life span. White collar musings, for sure, but there are at least a few drops of reality in there.
Who are you staying home for ? — #IStayHomeFor — love of love. Now we have a social media campaign, and for the first time I start to see social media as simply another aspect of our life these days, like the existence of a telephone. There is nothing to resist or judge, just choices to be made, more distraction and content to decipher and enjoy and avoid. All these ways that we create shared human space. All the same, I just ask, please #BeHuman.
Tough Smart Disciplined United Giving.
The toughest guys are tough enough to love, tough enough to use the word love.
We remember the past, we learn from the past. We remember the lessons and teach a new generation.
Hope —
Next year in Jerusalem will be better…
Now food grown in a warehouse in Queens has a smaller environmental impact than my grass-fed beef from Wisconsin (or even upstate New York). All the same, perhaps my grass-fed beef has less of an environmental impact than your coconuts from Thailand. Now we have to think about these things. Now they are less concept and more necessity. Here we are focusing on a new vision. The #NextEconomy. Here we are winning the generational battle, which means, we are the ones who are going to live to make it happen. Cultivating the ability to self-regulate and live. We are in a collective initiation portal. So incredibly overstimulated most of the time. This is our new baseline of stress. Can you feel that? Feel the quality of our perception.
In this moment that we are forced to say no to so many things, and simultaneously forced to say yes, how about also to realize that we have this same option of volition — to say both no and yes, to choose what we want to cultivate, and also, what we want to let go.
Vitalize the inhale, relax the exhale.
Maybe it’s not Venus Mars, but Alpha Beta, Delta Theta — we are moving into the crown — and all crowns are open at the top to receive source from above. Now we see all these unintegrated patterns of our childhood experiences — containing lessons we must now learn.
Our beta mind is our conditioned mind, the one ready to find the solutions for the next step we must do, a feedback loop of our survival patterns. With Beta we move quickly, processing information. Alpha is more expansive, encompassing, the Power of Now. Though Alpha is our resting state, for many people it is Beta-world in which they now live most of the time. Delta is deep restoration, dreamless sleep, with Theta is our waking manifesting of that deep meditation.
We must be very quiet to access Gamma, the fastest, most subtle and universal.
Our sister and brothers with disabilities, they are still the most vulnerable. They sent their mother to the emergency room in an ambulance and never heard from her again. Presumed she was dead. No one knew where she was until a journalist investigated and found an unlabeled body in the morgue. Now they know, even if it doesn’t make it feel them any better.
Maybe it gave him temporary relief, she said, from his hurt and anxiety, to find someone to identify as the cause, a target for his anger. Now it is the immigrants that are pointing out the way this country is failing. Perhaps they know better than native-borne the true meaning of the American Dream, that sense of freedom worth fighting for. It is their right to call out now the worst parts of America to itself — in the sense of improvement. This is the most miraculous part of America, that we create it all together.
(Even if this thought is too abstract for an immigrant mother on her lifelong quest for survival. Her very concrete existence having paved the way for my more luxuriously abstract one. I know the pride I feel at my own capacity of survival in the time is silly and vain, but that does not diminish its existence. In some ways I have been training for it, all the meditation and self-help and even working on and off a chef since two decades. Now it all combines to a sense of potential nourishment, actualized. All that time trying to survive unnecessarily and now we actually have to do it, grow food in the windowsill. If my Chinese immigrant mother had a religion, it would be survival, and I guess I am also a practitioner.)
Perhaps the key to all of this actually just being able to sit with discontent. It no longer seems necessary to give individual emotions a name. Instead I am just the witness, vaguely disinterested at times. Perhaps this is equanimity. The first time I truly practiced equanimity in meditation I came out of the session feeling drugged, as if put on tranquilizers. I didn’t like feeling disconnected empathetically from the world around me; couldn’t see that it actually I was equally taking in reality from all sides.
The troubling sensation of having something to give, and yet not the ability to give it, remains ever-present in my life.
Both boxes of tissues run out at the same time, which I suppose I could have anticipated. But this is a matter of minimal importance, like the ridiculous toilet paper hoarding outbreak. For now it is time to go out and take a walk, engage with the world, find a new home for my Christmas tree, who has been in the bathtub for a few days now losing pine needles due to inappropriate enclosure.
I find some of the scenes of dissociated ignorance in the parks make me uncomfortable. Not exactly like a nightmare, just very unreal, especially while there are bodies in cardboard boxes on the sidewalks in Ecuador. So many dead bodies, not enough places to go, not enough people to take them there. A nightmare, from which we do not wake up. The call it a cadaver crisis. A silent killer, no explosion.
The last Mardi Gras, that they never knew they were attending. Leave it to New Orleans, to hold the last party of an era that is now permanently over. There we all were, dancing in the streets, sharing drinks with everyone. I had three costumes, can you believe it? Danced in 5 different parades, the real locals ones, always dancing.
Now she is called into work, an ER nurse, attending a patient that had been in South Korea, through Thailand, then back to New Orleans via NYC. The fact that this is even possible is astounding. So many of our more concrete mothers, and their mothers before them, continuing to live as made sense to them, boiling red onions with eggs to make them a beautiful pink color for Eastertime. Others have competitions, bashing eggs against each other, seeing whose egg is harder.
Today in the park I saw a dog celebrating his birthday, complete with balloons and party hats — he rolled around in the grass, seemed happy to have another year to be in the park with his people, lapping up dog beer, while they smiled and cheered.
I felt something crack open — maybe it is the shell of an Easter egg, or else, the heart of humanity. Study the waters ahead, say our General.
“You shoulda stuck with it Bernadette, you almost had it…”
Let’s get someone who hasn’t asked a question yet.
Excuse me sir, I wanted to ask you about the burials on Heart Island.