Thank you to all who are working harder and longer under more risk.
Most of us have been forced to stop. We feel the harshness of the measures taken to fight the pandemic and keep safe. We’re staying in where we can do much less than we are used to doing so we won’t give the virus more opportunity to infect.
For many this is a new experience, to sit (or pace) with our thoughts in our homes; an enforced opportunity to think on higher things than building empires.
Last December I woke because of dreams on two successive nights. I knew it was time for the masses around the world to stop and give ourselves opportunity to contemplate what we have been too distracted to remember, that there is a greater reality than this materiality and without spiritual life all we have is a disintegrating world.
Some have minimized the threat and continue on their proud course; tossing around irresponsible statements they think will make the virus go away;
as if this is a TV show which resolves the plot in 50 minutes.
“I’m too busy for this. I have my goals and I get my way no matter what is in my way.
Get this virus in here and let’s deal.”
It is a mercy extended to us that we are stopped with the opportunity to contemplate our path, to consider wisdom left us from the past and what wisdom we offer the future.
Let us embrace this opportunity so we may emerge from the current troubles
with redeemed attitude.
Here is the poem from those two dreams.
I woke up this morning on my way
And the world was pulling apart;
I woke on the road and the world
In sections floated in directions apart.
We all on our ways
Kept driving, flying in formation
Sliding as the clumps of earth turned
All in different falls.
I woke up this morning on my way
Pushing my barge down the ancient river
And the river tried to flow
Now all overgrown by city.
I pushed the pole until the barge
Was sliding on the pavement;
And we slid the best we could
Through the busy, cluttered street
Where the river used to be
Until the barge could go no further
And the water was not remembered, piled over
By building, pavement and preoccupation.
We all on our ways
Keep busy striving like we can’t be stopped,
Sliding as the world churns
All over and away.
Mark R. Turner
Snowdrop House
December 3, 2019
