Corona Virus: Portal for Big Existential Questions

by Palika Rewilding

The quest for humanity in this singular moment in time is still an ecological one as the rapid ecological collapse due to our Industrial Growth Society’s habitation pattern and our collective level of patho-adolescent psycho spiritual stuckness looms large. The presence of Corona Virus brings to the forefront the most paradigmatic existential crisis for us. Now more than ever the question — what is the ecological niche of our species — becomes crystal clear before us. Asking what is the ecological niche of me, or you, of our collective is primal, crucial for our species if we are to have a meaningful participatory and beautiful partnership with Life. Without knowing this — what our ecological niche is — what beneficial relationship we provide to the tapestry of interwoven, interdependent, collaborative, shared body of us — there is no possibility of a long term, healthy, social structure convened in right relationship with the web of life. How do we truly belong here? What does an adult human species look like, act like? I define adult here as ecologically cooperative and life enhancing embodiment, aware of and faithful to our interdependent place and function in the web. With guidance and a map, intentionally reciprocal and eco literate psycho spiritual adulthood, is the promise of the present psycho spiritual death that not only Corona brings, but our entire planetary plunge into ecological and societal collapse created by our way of being on Earth. The portal for severance and dying of our current identity and destructive habitation pattern is open. Some of us are falling through. All of us could.

There is much for us to grieve as the only human habitation on Earth pattern/structure we’ve ever known (and have mostly conformed to and invested heavily in) begins to crumble. We feel insecure, we have fear. We grieve for what we never had — what didn’t happen — the ecocentric village where true Adults and Elders nurtured us into our unique place and pattern into the web of life, and was itself (the village), in a life enhancing beneficial relationship with the land and web. We grieve for what we expected and didn’t receive — somatically, emotionally, relationally, socially and ecologically literate culture. We grieve for all that happened to us and Others. We grieve the places that have not known love, the places of wounding, betrayal, violence, abandonment, hurt. We grieve for all that has passed and that we will lose everything we love — people, relationships, security, health, animals, forests, our bodies and our life. We grieve for how we in our human messiness have hurt people, planet, future ancestors, ourselves. We grieve the sorrows of the world. We grieve the griefs of our Ancestors and future Ancestors. We grieve the destruction of the evolutionary miracle that was the Cenozoic flowering.

Thus our griefs and our longings indicate its time to apprentice to the biggest psycho spiritual questions — how do I as an individual, how do we as a collective — live in awe, responsibility, love for the world? What is our individual and collective ecological niche? What is our place and making of beneficial relationships? What place/shape/flavor/note is ours — that we make — that we offer — to enhance the web of life’s complexity, diversity, beauty, resiliency, redundancy, life nurturing and carrying capacity? What is the place that Earth dreamed we might take? How is the way we are different than other animals a doorway into an ecological niche that is powerful, but humble and arrived at by choice and surrender and intelligence and insight, and most of all — in, through, as connection — as Nature - evolving ourselves?

Certainly now — we — in our current human habitation pattern are functioning as THE significant, imminent, mortal VIRUS. We as a collective weight and force in the stage of immature psycho spiritual development we are in, are more deadly to the entirety of the whole web of life and planet, than Covid is to us individually. While we fight in a small way for our immediate, individual lives; we get respite for a moment from the magnitude of an existential crisis that is upon us of our own making. From our own entrenchment in a deeply nature disconnected, eco unawakened, immature psycho spiritual adolescence, we have created an initiatory crisis of identity of such magnitude and discomfort and challenge, that its easier to avert our eyes and hearts and psyches from the big picture. It’s easier to avoid the really humongous ecological disaster crossing our doorstep and pretend that Covid is the biggest, singularly scariest thing that has ever happened (read to white privileged industrial growth society).

But in the evolutionary timeline of Earth’s extraordinary 4 billion year old story of human consciousness and awareness and knowledge unfolding, we human animals have arrived at an unprecedented psycho spiritual threshold. Never before have we been aware how small the world actually is — that it has limits — has an edge. Maybe Corona is one opportunistic portal in to this awakened awareness, but so is global ice melting, climate chaos, military build up, desertification, rapid mass extinction, forest eradication, oceans and river deaths, overpopulation, toxic air, soil, water, culture of hoarding, 15% of humans dominating the rest, the industrial growth society as a normative and desirable way of life, military enforcement of and reification of ownership and power over, rampant and violent sexism, racism, classism, speciesism, militarism, excessive animal cruelty, depression and unhappiness, disconnection, despair, addiction and ugliness of the highest magnitude materially, socially, spiritually.

There is one inquiry that is the seed of hope though — Who are we, Who am I, within the ecological web of life that is a collaborative compendium of intelligent, sentient, aware, reciprocal, complex, participatory relationships that enhance life? What are we as a species for? What am I as an individual for? To consume, to take, to hoard, to enjoy without responsibility of my impact, to be on top, to get what I want? Or might our adult embodiment and function as a species be to praise, to awe, to tend and make more beauty, complexity, diversity, abundance, fecundity, resiliency and notice our impact, take responsibility for the weight of our presence here on every realm — material, energetic, intention? Might we come to humbly understand that we are not the most important, or on top, or that too many of us is harmful, that we have a responsibility and a debt of gratitude to participate within Earth’s law? That our path to meaning and joy is about giving, serving, seeing, aweing — not taking and using and hoarding?

So perhaps its time to turn towards the World, turn towards the sentient Earth, give our curiosity and attention there rather than continuing the obsession with our own cleverness. Perhaps now is a time to pray and listen and inquire — about something beyond our own comfort, beyond what I want on the surface, beyond what’s in it for me now, beyond acquiescing to my fear about living or dying or getting to continue my investment and rewards in the Industrial Growth Society.

This yearning to know what it means to become fully human has been the central psycho spiritual and heart inquiry of my life and one that I’ve made a vow to support others in journeying into. It’s also a hunger I believe pulses in every one of us. This conscious intentional existential inquiry is more critical than ever because forests, animals, oceans, skies, jungle, earth, people. My heart breaks for our capacity to turn away from it. But I also trust that deep deep in the chasms of our heart it is what we truly and deeply long for — to belong to Earth, to take our ecological niche place here in ecstasy and love and in service to. That is what true adults do, they care for the village and that includes the web of the more than human world. True adults simply cannot exploit it or harm it, or kill it. No — they offer their visionary gifts to enhance, to mirror Earths intelligence, ways, and beauty.

Today I invite you to go out — alone to the woods, to the beach, to the oak, to the garden, to the bluff, to the mountain, to the river, to the jungle, and ask like Rilke:

“Earth, isn’t this what you want? To arise in us, invisible?
Is it not your dream, to enter us so wholly
there’s nothing left outside us to see?
What, if not transformation,
is your deepest purpose? Earth, my love,
I want it too. Believe me,
no more of your springtimes are needed
to win me over — even one flower
is more than enough. Before I was named
I belonged to you. I see no other law
but yours, and know I can trust
the death you will bring.”

We can trust the death that is occurring globally and in small and large increments of the Industrial Growth Society (our species’ adolescent built house), in you, in me, in our trust in the IGS. It is a huge and holy death that undergirds the blossoming of a psycho spiritually mature spring and the promise of the full gifts of the Adult summer. It is our innate indigenous blueprint and we are the only animals that have a choice as David Whyte says to blossom. But for this truth — “before i was named, i belonged to you. I see no other law”. No other law but Earth’s truth is evident before us — everywhere the screaming feedback — the way we inhabit here currently, the way we live on (not with), our shape in a world of shapes, is dysfunctional, not happy, not good, not love, not in knowledge, not in sync with the brilliance of the web of life, not the expression of a soulcentric maturation into human adulthood. What we have here, does not look like species adulthood, does not illustrate our species eco or psycho spiritual wholeness and maturation and integration. So we must trust this death, and trust that we have within us the original instructions for an ecological embodied adulthood — just like every other species on Earth does, who know what they are and their place all together in a web of myceliated cooperation.

I invite you NOT to use this particular wander time to ask Earth to help you survive, to be an oracle for you about better solutions for physical or emotional or material safety or to get things back to “normal” asap or help you have a small win.

I invite you to embrace your adult aloneness and gravitas in opening to the possibility that we are made for something way more expansive and deep and true than what we have created. I invite you for this wander — lean into the truth within that you are meant for participating in wholeness, in beauty, in loveness with the intelligence of the web of life — with the truth that there is an ecological niche for us, for you, for me. And that you can discover that by letting your first house of identity die (how we currently name ourselves and story ourselves), and enter into a primary relationship and wander with Mystery, with Wild, with the Web of Life, with the Psyche the Size of Earth.

Imagine that the Earth can and does speak to you in image, in feeling, in words, in poetry. Imagine that Earth dreams and longs — as you, through you, with you. Listen — what does Earth want now? Approach with humility, awe, praise — offer the gift of your exquisite attention, offer your broken heart and speak of your deepest longing in the dark caves of your heart, in the watersheds of your animal body. Tell — no show Earth how Their beauty and Mystery and diversity and brilliance and intelligence and creativity brings you to your knees — makes you quiver like a bee at the blossom, makes you hungry to make love with Them. Praise and play and dance and listen and let it happen to you. Be curiosity — Earth what do you long for now? Earth what is your pleasure? Earth what is your need? What is your Dream?

Please feel free to email me with stories of your wander, I want to hear.

References:

The Great Work by Thomas Berry. A vision for our place in the web of life.

Nature and The Human Soul by Bill Plotkin. A map and model of ecocentric human species adulthood. (this is the only book/map I’ve found that offers this)

The Work That Reconnects by Joanna Macy et al. Practices for loving the world as it is.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller. A map navigating the art of grief.