I Fly To Seattle Next Week, I’m Scared
Aligning your personal life with a planetary one isn’t easy
Flying blind
Next week I fly to Seattle. Near there, I will be alone for a huge chunk of the summer.
No one knows when the COVID-19 second wave arrives. I go alone. Sam can’t come.
I ‘m not confident about how it will go. More than likely, I’ll be safe on the flight, but what about stocking an entire household when I get there?
Hand-washing, hand wringing
I will return to our tiny cabin in the woods, but there’s a hitch, this year. We applied months ago to install a septic system, but we are far from completion. No septic, means no indoor plumbing.
I began thinking about people all over the world for whom simple hand-washing is an impossible hurdle. For many, just as before the pandemic, water access is an everyday challenge.
Without indoor plumbing, washing hands routinely at the hose, outside, is challenging.
Yet, I know I am lucky to even have a hose.
World woes
There’s daily news about this awful pandemic, but sift just a little further down. You find that the global problems of clean water access, diseases already present as existing conditions, poverty, and public reluctance to go to clinics, make daily tragedies.
Everyday now, I greedily seek out articles, videos, and lectures about how we can use the present horrible to reveal, reimagine, recreate, and rebuild, a better world. The now popular term for this is “Reset.”
With this is mind, I am resetting all my relationships with place, people, purpose, and profit.
Everyone alive must change from a “hopelessly entangled” relationship with the whole world to a “hopefully interwoven” one.
The truth is no longer deniable: We are a finite, problematic planet, with just one another, and nature, to lean on for a reset.
I seek out news about how much we are interwoven. For too long, this has been seen a hopeless.
We’re not hopeless.
Reset
Creating purpose and empowerment allows people to see that there are millions of things we can be better at. Creating partnerships, working with others to solve health issues, invariably touches upon job creation, and community security.
Resetting our relationships to planetary purpose, to mitigate the worst disasters of climate crisis, extinction, people in need, unsustainable food networks, and more coming pandemics, requires us ALL to join the team.
Right now, while I fear transition upheaval, people worldwide are scared. They are protesting racism, and injustice. They are seeking work. Or water. Or just simple inclusion.
I still don’t know how I will settle in Washington. I may have to face rejection. Talk to neighbors. I don’t know them well. They’re Trump supporters. Yikes!
But love that is hard to do, is the most crucial kind.
To reset, we must learn that this is a commons. We must never forget our mutual need for one another.
Remember. And Reset.
