Taking Time to Reflect
Taking Time to Reflect
contemplating life in pause
This morning the rain returned. Self-quarantine has a different quality when it’s cold and wet outside. Up here in Bellingham, Washington, we’ve been blessed with a remarkably long string of bright spring days, and all that sunshine belies the reality that our lives are radically altered…for the time being anyway.
Every ending gives way to a beginning. Night is always followed by a new day. Winter reliably gives way to Spring. Knowing this doesn’t make some endings less difficult…or less painful.
Lately, I've been considering questions like...
What happens when our collective quality of life is not spiritually and biologically sufficient?
What happens when our collective ways of being do not deeply honor and nourish life?
Might life itself offer us an ending, so that a new beginning can emerge?
The Coronavirus pandemic continues to bring us a cascade of immeasurable losses. It also invites us to consider how we might participate in a new era of global renewal.
Of course we can’t know for sure how global transformation might look. But early reports indicate that China’s lock-downs due to Covid-19 measurably reduced air pollution, thereby saving perhaps even more lives than the virus claimed. Sadly, these gains were short lived, and pollution rates are returning now that business-as-usual is resuming.
In this time of relative pause, we might ask ourselves why we are collectively responding to this virus more immediately and emphatically than we have to even bigger threats to human health and the viability of our planet.
We might also consider what our responses to this tragic opportunity might look like, beyond the immediate crisis.
Now more than ever, may we feel and honor our interconnectedness. May we allow the heartbreak of so many endings to give birth to something worthy of our love.
Explore with me through Creative Catalyst or The Gladstone Creative Community Lab, a community supported project to artfully co-create a New Earth culture.