Co-Vid 19 as the Voice of Mother Nature
There once was a world where people ran around unattached. Consumerism moved so fast, the earth began to suffer. Her rain turned to acid, her waters polluted, her breath stank of fossil fuels, her skin saturated in filth and oil spills. People manipulated her, taking more than they needed, relentlessly. Her bright, expressive palette that we named the Australian coral reef was bleached white, entire ecosystems dissolving in plain sight. Islands full of plastic particles forming from what humanity left behind. We filled whales, dolphins, sea turtles, and every creature of the sea with plastic trash. We destroyed, cut, burned and consumed 100,000’s of species in the Amazon so we could make toilet paper. We wrapped everything in plastic and then placed it in plastic bags… including bird wings and dolphin noses. We sold anything we could piece by piece, dumping our waste into the currant of the ocean with high hopes that because we couldn’t see it, it didn’t affect us. In their own ignorance and greed the unattached people thought they ruled the earth.
We tried to combat this epic fail by using steel straws and bringing our own bags but the damage was indeed so exponentially beyond that, it was a futile effort. Factory workers suffered to produce quickly enough, not getting paid enough, in ruthless conditions just to produce the ever sought after, must have, precious… iPhone. We all carry them in our pockets, the product of other people's suffering. I read once they put nets up in one of these factories, to keep workers from jumping and committing suicide… people were fed so much media daily, it was hard to know what the truth was. People were worked to death, their passions manipulated so they could control the machines. People were fed a lie that if you worked for the best years of your life you could one day retire and be free, it was modern day slavery. It was slavery for the corporations and as the rich got richer, the middle class and poor continued to pull the endless levers to produce their profit. People were sold a dystopia fairy tail that the two week vacation was a reward for their efforts, that the health care insurance would protect them, that the retirement fund would one day offer the life they always wanted. Its like the water torture techniques they used in gunatanomo bay, but for peoples poetic dreams. Institutions and corporations slowly but surely break down the psyche into manipulating entire societies to be asleep. People began ruling under these terms , becoming racist, misogynistic monsters… acting very presidential, collecting followers behind them as masses of sheep kneeling down to catch the harmful lies that fell forward from their crusted lips.
The world was moving so fast it seemed we would never be able to catch up. People stuck in a constant motion of produce, succeed, make more, take more, do more, fly more. We built our cities so dense and high we could no longer see the land. We poured concrete over all the grassland and filled it with gasoline cars stuck on a carousel of interstates, winding around each other hopelessly for decades. We filled the most stunning edges of her coasts with resort hotels. So people could fly around and capture the perfect instagram post and live a western moment on the eastern side of the planet. Meanwhile, a few streets over a family of indigenous people are weaving baskets and capturing rare butterflies so their beautiful wings might be made into jewelry to sell to the tourist, just so they can have a bowl of rice for their family.
The animals were hunted, their bodies turned into trophies and non profits were formed that praised this idea towards a twisted version of wild life protection. Saying the rare black rhino was aggressive and dangerous, that his skin would be a viable factor to save the rest. Is it not an act of dangerous aggression to pass bullets through the flesh of another creature, is it not an act of twisted, profit driven, manipulation to think that man could ever truly control and dominate nature or that we in ourselves are not actually the dominate species. The latest version of the human being, our ego swelled to be so massive we manipulated the world to such a feat that we began to believe that we were separate from it all.
People socialize constantly, not paying attention to their home life and their family. The wisdom of the elderly purposefully placed in retirement homes to be forgotten or at least “unburdened” from their own relatives. Grateful, the elderly sat amongst each other with handfuls of playing cards, happy for their 401k they spent their entire life working for so their family could call them once a year on Christmas. The youth recklessly squandering their vitality in concrete cities consuming so much alcohol that they danced, fucked, and spent themselves with hollow intention. Their lives becoming shells of who they could be, the potential of the next generation held on a razor edge of expectation and exploitation. Women were convinced to have unnecessary surgery, valuable resources and energy was spent on nose jobs, breast enhancements, botox, and fat injections. Extreme, invasive forms of physical manipulation so women could be literally cut into a mold to fit a false image. Pharmaceutical companies manipulated desperate parents into cons of ADD and ADHD medication, doing anything they could to hook the population to a pill to solve their problems. Selling surgery after surgery to trap people in a pain loop of trauma and hospital bills. People were sold a chemical band aid to a massive spiritual wound. People were indeed depressed, unconnected, unfocused, tired and suffering but the doctors couldn’t help them to see that the solution is beyond a chemical equation. There is no profit to be had when people become their own healers, when people access their own pharmacy within by changing their processed food diets, getting enough rest, properly exercising and tuning inward to themselves. The powerful truth was damned sure to be kept under lock and key from the masses.
Some people worked their entire lives to fight this broken system. Altruistic people with good and strong hearts fought endlessly to right the wrongs of the ego driven, industrialized consumerism. They practiced good methods, worked to clean the ocean shores, saved the forgotten animals, started funds to help the poor, they became great teachers and empathetic listeners. They did implement systems of great change for the good of all. They studied how to live in harmony and created lifestyles and industries with carbon neutral footprints. The connected people created cars that used cleaner energy and machines that used the abundance of the wind and sun to power entire energy systems. Some people fought for better lives, for more equal pay and for more balance in an insanely sick society. Some people indeed were fighting the good fight, but even this was not enough to capture the monster that we had become.
Mother Nature fought back in her small battles. Expressing herself through forest fires, hurricanes, global warming, melting the ice caps, flooding the coasts, invasive cancer cells, endangering her own species, and finally her silent ingenious weapon was revealed . A virus, Co-Vid 19. A virus so perfectly designed it remained invisible to our human eye, its intelligence hidden in the ability to attach, move fast and kill swiftly. It consumed and confused the world so quickly. Its engineering far exceeds the brightest minds of modern medicine. It is the biggest cosmic wrench thrown into her own system. For the first time in centuries… our tireless production stopped.
The world fell quieter, and for a brief moment in human history… we were stilled.
People were told to stay inside and within a matter of weeks the entire world's commerce began shutting down like a child pushing over dominos. A weighted velvet blanket of uncertainty fell over our human conditioning. Mother Earth quickly took the opportunity to explore her gorgeous expansiveness. The waters and air became clearer, without the relentless pollution being poured into her. She bloomed, and the people inside their homes were at last given a chance to bloom themselves. A breath of fresh air, the irony that is our delicate masked existence. People began to learn the forgotten lesson of stillness. A massive transformation occurred so quickly, the ability to continue education becoming more accessible, the family life more connected, and our interactions cleaner. The internet seemed to finally step into the role it was created for, taking its first “big boy” job to expand consciousness further, to connect people more deeply. Everyone was going online to share their inner knowledge worldwide.
The no discrimination policy was the elegance of the virus. Her focused prey was adult human beings, who were all held subject to her deathly capture. Children, dogs and all other species granted with immunity, as the silent creeping hand of death graciously and poetically forgot them. Prime ministers, celebrities, the rich, the poor, the elite, the middle class and the meek all subject to her breathless final moment. She took her victims through suffocation, eliminating the very thing humanity took for granted, pure air. We had wrecked so much havoc on our own air pollution we pierced a hole into her ozone layer weakening her own shield of protection.
She was relentless the way she changed the world. Silently humble in her approach to realign humanities own design. Her aim to realign our society that we so brashly thought we were in total control of. She was strategic, swift, and extremely powerful in the way she conducted business. She sent the entire planet to their rooms giving us time to think, to reinvent, to create a different way. She stopped all travel, so we might see our own homes and community differently. She gifted us a global tragedy so we might see each other as equal, so we might move forward and rebuild with compassion, humility and less aggression. She forced us to begin to work together by taking away the structures we thought were so vital. People began to realize they needed less, they wanted to give more, to be vessels of service for a greater cause.
Her expression is a divine revolution. We are forced to turn inward, to realize who we really are and how to overcome our greatest obstacle. The obstacle of ourselves, the obstacle of self doubt, of not being good enough, rich enough, labeled correctly enough, of simply not being enough. When we look at profit through the lens of defining who we are, we realize that the things that are really important are all the moments outside of that. We inherently tap into how deeply we love each other and ourselves. We are gifted daily with sunrises and sunsets, with talented people creating paintings and symphonies that delight our senses towards overwhelming joy and sorrow so we might build a better tomorrow.
Mother nature has released a powerful weapon, a silent, invisible menacing particle. Perhaps one day we shall defeat it, but not without looking at an incredible wake of social, economic, and physical destruction… or shall we name it transformation. She crumbled our way of life purposefully, now how will we choose to live differently? How do we choose to use crisis as an invitation to take only what we need, and to use everything we take? The earth is 4.6billion years old, if we scale that to 46 years, humanity has been here for 1 minute. In that one minute we have destroyed half of our planet. In order to be great, we must realize our failures and overcome them. Our time is finite and forever being spent. Now is the time to innovate, to turn inward and to listen to the message our mighty planet is speaking to us.