You came into our life out of nowhere and flipped everything upside down and inside out. Life as usual has become a way of the past in the mere blink of an eye. You, smaller than the human eye can see, reproduce yourself exponentially, seemingly without effort. You have defied the odds and hitchhiked your way around the globe faster than any of our modern technology could detect. Man-made boundaries and borders mean nothing to you.
You have blown our schedules and plans apart and called our entire way of living into question. You have stopped us in our tracks in ways nothing else has been able to do...not threat of war nor warning of mass extinction, even to our own kind. You, dear Corona, have stopped the clock. You have shut down our factories, closed our schools, halted mass production and performances of all kinds. You have managed the unthinkable. World class athletes around the globe, and the fans that worship them, are on their knees in reverence of your unmatched strength and power. You have forced the hand of biological clocks, irrespective of creed or citizenship. You have tanked the almighty stock market. You have awakened world leaders everwhere to the vital fact that our only way forward is together. The very survival of our elders and most vulnerable across this globe depend on a kind of collaboration this world has never managed before. You, dear Corona, are little but mighty...fiercely mighty at that! Our clocks were ticking faster and faster in all realms of life. We raced hither and yon to keep up with the Jones’. Corporate marketeers and mongers convinced us that was the right thing to do...that racing fast enough, far enough, for long enough would eventually lead us to the happiness that always seemed just out of reach. We cried out to be let off that dizzying merry go round while continuing to zoom ahead at our usual clip. We collectively created a world that made it nearly impossible to do otherwise. You rushed in with a speed that has left our heads spinning and our feet glued in our tracks by lock down and quarantine. While you are wreaking havoc upon and testing every man-made system in existence, you are giving us something we have long been crying out for. You are gifting us with the biggest timeout humanity has ever experienced before. You are giving us an exclusive opportunity to break from everything we have become dependent upon to examine if there is a different way, a more humane or ecologically friendly way, to go about the great task of living. You are gifting us with insight about human connection and how much it matters to us in spite of all of our technological advances. You are teaching us what a precious gift it is to walk, stand or sit elbow to elbow with another beloved human being, even if we don’t know them by name. You are teaching us that in spite of all marketing efforts to sell us the elixir of youth, nothing can replace the lost life of any of our elders. You are forcing us to slow down, to look at ourselves, our patterns, our habits, our values, everything about who we are individually, as a family, as a community, a nation, a species at large. You are giving us an opportunity to think, pray, talk, contemplate, consider. Must we go on living at the speed we have grown to call normal, even though most of us would wholeheartedly agree that it is not? Must we go on using up all that Mother Nature has left to give, because we failed to listen to her repeated “enough's” that have come in the form of a plethora of unforeseen natural disasters and now in the form of a tiny microbe that has managed to strong arm us all? Dear Corona, the wildfire of all virus’ that have left carnage in your wake, you have gotten our attention. We beseech you to stop your lethal spread across our shared home. But are you saving us from an even bigger calamity if we do not heed your call to action now? May we act swiftly, powerfully and unilaterally across this globe to curb your impact. May we seize this unprecedented opportunity to change our ways once and for all for the least of our brethren that stand to gain the most from our willingness to change.
1 Comment
|
I'm Kelly Isabelle.Full-time workin' mama & spouse aspiring to live a slowly paced, sustainably minded, creatively expressed, clutter-free life shared with kindred folk. Archives
March 2020
Categories |