A Dizzied Dispatch from the Covid Era- 6/9/2020

For all that I seek to listen to and engage with the world at large, I find that my open interest has delivered me into a strange prostration, an internal cacophony the match the outer.

Dizzy with conflict, chaos, and confusion, I see signs pointing in every direction — they point stiffly at each other, whirl into conspiratorial ethers, or dive into the wet bogs of despair. Other signs point to necessary evolution (hail the inventive mother!), redemptive grief, the call for creative healing and collective action.

It seems like everything is happening at once — time forgets and repeats itself; it rhymes, renews, rots, remembers; it changes and innovates and grows. Generalizations about “what’s happening” miss more marks than they hit. It is wise to disbelieve the narrowly certain.

Things are opening and closing, beginning and ending, rising and falling — simultaneously and extremely rapidly.

Life is a wild, fluctuous dance by its nature, but the pace of change is accelerating so quickly that the river of life now feels to me like an oceanic flood. (Does it feel this way to you?) I see familiar riverbanks submerged, entire continents of diverse ecologies inundated, the terrain transforming completely.

We will need new landmarks and new lodestars.
We will need new maps of Earth and Sky.
We need to learn now how to move with the wild, heaving ocean-storm.
(Do you swim, surf, or sail?)

The alternative to clever and earnest adaptation is myriad possible deaths sooner rather than the inevitable later.
The stakes will only get higher from here.