Coronavirus: in, with, as, gift
part I: Becoming Other
It’s possible to ask for something without wanting it or wishing for it. These words enter me as a visitation this morning in wake of receiving the results of a now all-too-familiar test. After what feels like a lifetime, the coronavirus has swept into my bodily home. It shouldn’t be a surprise, given the previous two days of hellish bodily aches and fatigue, but yet to know for certain has an apparent way of changing things.
I’m sure these bodily pains have scientific explanations that exceed my capacity for understanding but this morning I find myself wondering about other less measurable dimensions of this experience. What is the connection between my thoughts and this sickness? Are these pains the physicality of fear? And what feels like a fringe-dwelling question, does the virus enter the body only with granted permission and I have now somehow unconsciously consented to play host, a situation I could have avoided had my internal state been different, more pure?
These questions are my way of feeling around the thing, of exploring its contours, it’s edges, its hidden surfaces. I realize that I’m not asking them as a means of getting necessary answers but rather as a way of finding my breath in this new medium of existence. I often think about how each breath is unique and how each new space (physically and otherwise) invites for a different way of breathing, a unique motion and attention to how the breath is shaped by and shapes its environment. These questions I’m asking are my way of dancing with the world. And this time, the world has come to me.
Why is it, I wonder, that we’re so afraid to ask questions, particularly the absurd ones? Why is it that we pressure ourselves into having an answer for everything unfamiliar and familiar alike? Why do we content ourselves with settling for explanations at all? Is understanding really all we seek? Is the safety of familiarity our North Star?
Sitting now in my room of isolation with the next ten days stretching out before me, I’m drinking tea with fear. When it first came, I implored it to find another place to go, to leave me in peace. When these pleadings were met with indifference I asked it to at least wipe its feet on the doormat. I might as well have saved my breath. It laughed and I knew there was no sending this one away so I ushered it in, bid it make itself comfortable, lit a candle, and readied the libations.
We sat for a long while together in a many-faced silence, unspoken tensions wringing the air between us, the atmosphere electrified with an abyssal static. As I looked, its face was at first familiar to me. I knew its lines, its shadows, its keen look, its indentured shapes. But as the moments passed, as the sun inched across the frames of my windows, I began to see a slowly transforming visage. A shapeshifter in my home? I had been taught to distrust such things. One could never tell what their real form was. This one should have no right making itself at home in my lovingly made abode. And yet I could not look away because I simply did not want to. It was somehow rapturous, divine, both of this world and not of it. In its eyes I was utterly lost yet wholly found.
Up until that moment, I had been regarding this one as mine- my fear, my burden. But as it held my gaze, it and I became something other. This one was no longer mine. It was no longer mine to welcome or to banish, not that either would have changed the course of its ways anyhow. This one belonged to those I love. This was a messenger, an angel of sorts come as a threshold across which lay the worlds of those I live physically with and of whom this virus now more readily and proximally reached. I could not cross over through that doorway, but I could look and in that moment I became other. The fear was not for myself, nor was it for others. It was the fear of others, the very fear they held in their minds and bodies. I was bound to them in some strange twist of incarnated conscious love. I was them in their uncertainty. Assumptions had excused themselves and I was left as bond, a interconnection itself, not as one in relationship.
part II: (In)coherent Myth
It’s remarkable how the ways in which we speak mirror the myth we live by. Beginning to listen to our language, how we use it and how it uses us, is like looking in a mirror that cannot lie. Our language shows us our own centrality, our own subtly usurped godship. We speak in assumptions of objectivity as foundational (“the” truth, or for that matter, anything prefaced with “the”), in gestures of arrival (“I’ve a long way to go before I reach enlightenment”), in guilded hopes of finality (“when we at last have peace”), or in terms of ownership (“my” fear). But what if our assumption that we own our fears is a way of both aggrandizing and diminishing ourselves so as not to have to accept the gifts offered by that fear?
The aggrandizement has us believe that we’re big enough to own and thus control our fears, that our grandness and personal power are best employed through a heroic challenging of life and its terms. The diminishment is the inverse. If we live according to the assumption that journeying onward happens by claiming our fears, then we have unwittingly committed ourselvs to playing the singular role of an owner. In so doing, we have undermined our inherent power by coupling it with control, by believing that our strength comes from courageously claiming.
These frameworks are children of our myth, a myth in which we’re presented again and again with dualistic choices of aggrandizement or diminishment, this or that, right or wrong, fact or falsity, objectivity or subjectivity, progress or regression. It’s a myth of exclusivity, of hierarchical values where contradictions are discredited and multiplicity is besmirched.
In the face of this current pandemic, our myth is coming glaringly to the forefront. When everything is a duality, everything is a war. Covid is one thing only: an enemy. And how could it be otherwise? Modernity’s religion is science and its scripture, facts. Facts provide necessary order by tethering us to an external objectivity. But “objectivity” is, from its very conception, in service to what we’re able to comprehend. If it’s not comprehendible, we deem it noncanonical, unfit for consideration.
A world built on understanding is a safe world. And a safe world is the most dangerous kind.
In a world of understanding, it’s difficult to think that this whole experience wouldn’t require managing. The only logical goal should be to want to get over this sickness, fight it (or more progressively said, assist my body in fighting it), get better again, restore my health, and move on as my normal self alive to the day once more. Being sick, particularly with Covid, is nothing but a negative, unfortunate occurrence whose presence is a hindrance keeping me from participation in desirable life. But I feel in my bones something despotically impoverished about this way of seeing things. When you’re taught everything’s a fight, it’s hard to see anything as other than friend or foe.
Any worldview is rife with gaps and inconsistencies. Far from regarding these inconsistencies as inherent, our myth has us root these out and admonishes us to create a perfectly coherent and sensical worldview, one we can keep in our back pocket to be whipped out at a moments’ notice for defense against unreason. But a coherent worldview is a destitute one.
By subjugating the mysterious world under the jackboot of understandability, we strip our being of relationship, vouching instead for an independence that knows only self-reliance. To strip the world of its relational essence is to make it reducible, packable into a reality of familiarity. It is to partition the world and separate it from ourselves, to make it unreachable except through dispassionate, impersonal, cold facts. It is to view the world as dead, something to be observed, experimented on, and extracted from. It is to desanctify everything we know and every as yet unimagined possibility wanting to burst forth.
part III: Lost Limits
With all the reports of overcrowded hospitals, lack of medical supplies, and crumbling infrastructures, it would seem that a cataclysmic monster is at our collective door. But consider for a moment the large picture. At the time of this writing, the World Health Organization statistics report that there have been 281,808,270 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 5,411,759 deaths.[1] These numbers are striking in their enormity. However, in terms of percentages, these numbers become striking in their smallness. The number of cases is 0.036% of the world’s population. Of that percentage, 0.019% were deaths. In other words, Covid deaths have claimed 0.00069% of the world’s population. That’s seven millionths of 1%.
I’m not enlisting these statistics to negate the troublesome nature of this virus. I’m citing them to show how contextually small this monster actually is. If the structure we put so much faith in, the one that sustains our entire global way of life, the one that we apparently would believe anything in order to sustain, is falling to pieces at the hands of such diminutive a monster, then how sound is that structure really? If our structure in its behemothical form cannot hold itself up in the presence of such a relatively piddling force, then no amount of structure will be our savior for what lies ahead. And yet, more structure, more control, more knowledge is the only way we appear capable of responding. In our warmongering, fighting against both what we understand and what we don’t, justified by all our scientific knowings, we’re playing an unwinable game. When we have at last desanctified everything, what left is there to save?
Our own familiar ways of knowing; our own fabricated, shattered, and habitual frameworks of reality. That’s what’s left to save.
Do we ever stop to ask what it is we’re saving? We glorify the hero and strive above all to be one but do we know why? Are we even curious to know why? Are we willing to drop down through all the layers of our reasoning and justifications, dig below every internal response to the question “why?,” and reach the subterranean caverns where only the unknown dwells? Are we willing to go to the wild? Are we willing to be lost?
Why should we be willing to be lost? Lostness does not bequeath itself to reason, though it is by no means above it. It is in lostness that we come to know limitation, and if the sacred can be seen, limit is the lens through which we see it. The sacred is made in relation to limitation. Limitation necessitates multiplicity, eschewing any sense of one-fits-all, any single solution. In fact, it exists entirely outside the problem-solution framework.
The worldview that holds solutions at the center, is a worldview that sees reality as composed of problems. Here we continually find ourselves living as a response, as an agent of control, perpetually managing chaos and shepherding it into the coral of normalcy, of making the unknown familiar, of taming the wild for our entitled safety. Safety is our central god and safety revolves around us.
We have wrapped ourselves so fully in the garments of self that we can no longer see beyond our own nose. We are the human, the center of everything. We have shunned limitation and belittled it into nothing more than a hindrance on the way to our true selves. We have made ourselves the center of the world and in so doing, we have become less. This is the dehumanizing nature of antropocentrism.
By making our humanity dependent on us alone, we thereby sacrifice our humanity and cease being human. When will we realize that it is our relation to everything else that makes us human? Limitation is the spotlight of that relationality. It is the point where I end and you begin. In a world whose foundation is logic, it’s a difficult thing to see this as credible.
Logic creates a world of spectrums, of singular descriptions and singular truths. It creates a world of exclusivity, imperial morphing, and colonial homogeneity. It creates a fabricated reality at the cost of imagination. We love the inspirational vitality in the image of imagination having no limitations, but imagination’s magic comes only from the presence of limitation. It could be said that limitation is the mother of imagination, that the latter is birthed from the former. Fullness emerges out of limit.
This is nothing short of an inversion of 2,000-plus years of our civilizational thought. The East (if we can speak in such simplistic terms) has known this for a great many millennia. The West (which I’ll substitute with “Modernity”) is at a point of reckoning where its gospel is folding in on itself, no longer able to support its own weight. How desperate a fight it’s staging. Perhaps it’s inevitable that it would declare everything a war. The energy of Modernity is fixation, distillation of all variables and phenomena into a singular unmoving simulacrum. It regards truth as Truth, as singular, as objective, and anything that threatens that notion (which under the light of honesty we come to realize is everything) is not afforded a place in our court. We go about our busy lives, unwittingly using our doing as a rejection of limitation and we regard trouble only as something to respond to, as a force that necessitates more doing.
part IV: With and As
I’ve often wondered how deities like Kali have such a strong following. Kali brings nothing but trouble. Real trouble. Destruction, death, the very things whose comings are our endings. But the worship of Kali, this type of force, comes from a larger cosmology, one in which the individuated self is not the center of everything. Our individuated self sees trouble as dismemberment. But what if trouble is the world’s invitation of marriage? A breakdown in identity then, a full experience of limitation, is the very same experience of union, of pure relation.
In my moment of recognizing the face of fear as the unsettledness of others, I am bound more fully to them, in ways I do not yet know. This virus has come with a gift which we on every front appear loath to receive. It brings with it the offering of fundamentally and paradigmatically shifting our very notions of wellbeing, safety, interconnection, and intra-connection.
This time now is an occasion for us to wonder at our impulse to “do something” in the face of trouble, and to wonder at the ways in which this response is a rejection of trouble’s gift. Receiving it may and likely will mean a death of sorts. No wonder we make ourselves too small and too large.
I can no longer speak of the world as a thing other than myself, something I exist in. Rather, I exist with and as the world. The world is happening in and as me, in and as you. What is happening in and as us is what the world is doing. We are at one with the world. This is not an achievement, nor is it an experience. It is a quaint realization. A realization of and with our bones, with the heart that is humanity’s heart. It is a remembrance.
part V: The Gift
It’s only now that the biological variant of the virus has entered my body, but I’ve had this virus from the very moment it became know globally. We’ve all had it since the beginning. This pandemic is more than the biological. It’s the fear, the emotional turmoil, the civil unrest, the hurricane that is our politics, the economic plummets and summits, the confusion, the separation, the loneliness, the jubilations, the outpourings of love, the shifts in our knowings of identity, the new forms of an experiential knowing that we’re part of something larger than we could have imagined previously… It’s everything we know and everything we don’t know.
On offer to us is a more conscious recognition that we are bound together, that the world happens in and as all of us and in and as everything. It happens in and as the tree, the pebble, the birds, the fish, the deer, the ocean just as fully as it does in us. On offer to us is the laying down of the crushing burden of bearing our own weight, of regarding ourselves, our species, as the center of it all. On offer is the chance to consciously step back into the fold of life (as if we ever left it), to know life and our participation in it as a rhizomatic web rather than a linear hierarchy with ourselves at the peak or a mapped territory with us at the center. What appears as finite death only, might prove to be a newfound and remembered capacity to dance as the levity birthed by the dropping of the impossible-to-bear burden that is our self-absorption.
Withness is transformative. The virus and the experience of it in all its gruesome and revelatory forms is a withness, a collectivity of unity. It’s possible to ask for something without wanting it or wishing for it. Dare I ask? I must… I can’t not… I wonder if we’ve collectively been asking for a crisis such as this. To what ends I don’t know but we’re always searching for connection, for an identity that extends beyond the borders of individuality. And this crisis surely holds that potential. Looking to our playbook of human history, it appears that we’re again attempting to employ the classic play of finding unity by emphasizing a common enemy. We should know by now that this is a false unity and it will not last.
The gift is what lasts. An indigenous way of being is a way of living in and as the gift. The gift is not based in an identity of opposition. It doesn’t need an enemy in order to sustain itself.
All civilizational myths have crumbled or undergone profound shifts, just as have the civilizations supported and birthed by them. As our myth transfigures, I wonder what its agent of change will be. It’s likely not reducible but it undoubtedly has to do with gift. As our culture speaks more and more of sustainability, we are forced to explore what that word really means. Is it nourishing, generative, creative, fruitful? Or is it merely propping up an extractive way of living?
We’re being confronted with how our so called sustainable worldview necessitates a distant and separate other through the myth of objectivity, how our addiction to understanding and doing is a perpetual rejection of the sacred, and how we are not fed but rather toxified by our own taking. Out of pain we can recognize the gift as the greatest medicine. For too long we’ve put ourselves before creation. It’s time now to decenter the human, to return the gifts of life to life itself, and in turn be gifted back. This time, may we see them as gifts, not as resources to be taken.