Signs of Light
A silver lining of social distancing is that it’s bringing me closer (virtually, of course) to my geographically distant friends and family. Over the past week, I’ve had long talks with my sister in Virginia, and sister-in law in California. I’ve reconnected with old friends through LinkedIn and email. And over the weekend I was delighted by a phone call from one of my dearest friends who lives in Atlanta.
I related to her a conversation I’d had earlier in the day with my 16 year old daughter, Anna, about the lack of traffic on the road and how that is probably doing wonders for Mother Earth who doesn’t miss our pollution one bit. Anna commented she’d seen a story online about how the smog is actually clearing over Beijing and other Chinese cities, as people have been forced out of their cars and into their homes.
What beautiful irony that a virus that attacks the human respiratory system is allowing the Earth, once again, to breathe.
My friend then found and read to me the following passage that, more than anything else I’ve seen, read, or heard, gives me hope for when the crisis has passed, and it will. Please share it with everyone you love.
Received March 19, 2020
Attributed to an English translation by one Kitty O’Meara, but said to have been thought and expressed by a journalist in Italy, whose elderly population is currently being decimated by the COVID-19 disease, the words we leave you to ponder:
“And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.
“And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.
“And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.”
