As the pandemic gets increasingly worrisome, especially in the United States where surge is happening in almost every region of the nation, it occurs to me this is current reality. What Alan Watts calls, " the great stream, the eternal now" and what we call life. Because life is always in motion. Life is change. Life and death are one in the same. Movement of our souls, our beings, our bodies from one realm (if you are religious) to another. And all of these "words do not give life; they merely symbolize it" says Watts.
Today's symbols are 12.5 million people in the world have contracted coronavirus and 3.2 million are Americans. We as humans first uttered words (how amazing to think of what it first felt like to call someone by their name instead of as grunt) then we figured out how to write them down. The symbols (words) we right down are not real life. They are entertainment for our conscious minds to claim and store away for the purpose of trying to understand life.
To be still is to die, but to move is to live.
Rebecca Elson was not yet forty when she passed from non-Hodgkins-Lymphoma. Yet she left behind her a legacy of over 50 scientific essays and a poem anthology entitled A Responsibility to Awe and inside was a short poem called Evolution: "We are survivors of immeasurable events, flung upon some reach of land, small wet miracles without instructions, only the imperative of change."
Of course she saw us humans as survivors. We have endured. We have outlasted war, famine, natural disasters, plagues and disease beyond imagination. We will survive the pandemic.
Naturally, some will not. This is the order of things beyond our comprehension. (We know not truly whence we came-evolution or creation- and we will not know the second of our death)
The fact is human life will continue and progress and digress as it has for centuries. Why? Well because Ms. Elson tells us in her words. We are indeed miracles. Although our bodies are finite and destructible they still posses amazing powers of strength, endurance and recovery. But as she stated, without instructions. This leaves us to our one and only creative device, our brain, which has enabled us to not only survive, but thrive. Sending rockets into space, performing scientific marvels and incredible medical operations to prolong life. Most importantly, our natch for survival of these immeasurable events is the critical element of change. How crucial it is for us to adapt and overcome? It is all the answers to all the questions. (although many go unanswered-ah, the mysteries of existence!) Change is peace talks, the industrial evolution, the invention of things big and small and vaccines. We will create a vaccine. It must be. It is our destiny to survive, to change, keep on keeping on. It is what we have done and will continue to do for eons and beyond.
Je vous souhaite le meilleur (I wish you all the best- translated from French)
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