Try a little tenderness 💫
We humans are having a tough year.
But we aren’t alone in our susceptibility to pandemics. They unfold around us all the time, in trees and birds and frogs.
Chronic Wasting Disease spreads when healthy and infected deer share food or water, as deer do.
Phocine Distemper Virus is a highly transmissible respiratory virus that causes mass mortality in seals. It spreads when they gather in the spring for breeding season, as seals do.
Nosema Disease, which severely weakens or wipes out bee colonies, is spread when healthy bees clean infected bees’ waste inside their hives, as bees do.
SARS-CoV-2 spreads among humans when they share space and time, as humans do.
These are some other things that humans do: They deny that it’s happening, or they insist that we focus on its happening to the exclusion of all else. They make sacrifices to protect each other. They look for who to blame.
Some blame China. Early on, some blamed big city-dwellers and their choice to live in disease-promoting density. Now many urbanites are blaming rural people and their backward, science-denying ways.
A whole lot of folks blame Trump. Many blame people who don’t wear masks. My cousin in Toledo blames the masks themselves (claiming that inhaling CO2 changes the body’s pH to create a more disease-prone environment).
Underlying all the blame is a shared feeling, poured into different molds. The feeling is a combination of fear and anger and grief, a terrifying loss of control. The molds give the feeling a shape, a way to hold it and carry it around. You can pick whichever one you choose.
I wonder if the deer do this, or the seals. When a virus sweeps through, do they hurry to come up with a list of foolish deer and selfish seals to blame?
Who do I blame? The medical industrial complex that studiously ignores the evidence linking diet, lifestyle, and disease, choosing instead to make people feel that their only recourse against Covid is isolation and anxiety. The corporations that sell us disease-causing “food” doused in microbiome-depleting chemicals. The capitalist forces that trade millions of annual premature deaths from chronic disease for profit. That’s the mold I pour my anger into.
The blaming helps. It implies a specific cause, and therefore a solution. If only those dumb/evil assholes over there would shape up, we’d be out of this mess. It obscures the messy, invisible ways we’re all implicated — the way our values and choices exist in a tangled ball of roots, how we’re all products of our environment and conditioning.
We’re a single porous organism. What enters is exceedingly likely to spread: a belief, a lifestyle, a virus.
Climate change spreads asymptomatically, until it doesn’t. Heart disease and type 2 diabetes spread asymptomatically through communal behaviors and cultural norms. Covid can spread asymptomatically, until it finds a vulnerable host. These are slow-moving and invisible dangers evolution has not perfectly prepared us to address.
Instead, evolution inclines us to eat processed foods that exploit our brains’ response to fat, salt, and sugar. It inclines us to gather with our nearest and dearest. Doing these things is hard-wired, even when we know they could kill us, quickly or slowly or somewhere in between.
Enter science. Science will save us! Science will protect us from the modern risks of our evolutionary programming. We can pop a pill for heart disease, suck the carbon out of the air, whip up a vaccine for any zoonotic virus our habitat destruction has helped create.
Bad news: Science will not save us, as long as we’re using it to reinforce the illusion that we’re separate from nature, that we can continue humanity’s experiment in domination and control. Try as we might, science is not a sure-fire portal out of being animals, one species in a web of relationship to countless others.
So what can we do? Maybe we can start by putting our anger and blame down now and then, and trying on tenderness for the human condition — the condition of being smart enough to know what not to do, but not yet wise enough to manage not to do it.
We can try on tenderness for the fact that we’re not purely rational machines. Tenderness for our pain when the illusion of control is shattered. Tenderness for the stubborn human tendency to value pleasure and connection over longer life.
Maybe when we stop denying and shaming all our human haplessness, really see and accept ourselves as we are, we can invite wisdom to keep working on us. Because that stuff spreads too: acceptance, tenderness, a gentle readiness to evolve. In the porous organism of the collective us, each of us is a cell, a tiny part that can start to be more conscious of what it’s spreading. A tiny part that can change the vibration of the whole.
Brain Food
I found this video of Daniel Schmachtenberger, founder of Rebel Wisdom, super provocative. Fair warning, it's pretty long, but you can put it on in the background and listen to it like a podcast. It's about our crumbling ability to make sense of the world around us and what's needed to fix it. Here's a little taste of what he has to say:
"If there are whole chunks of populations that you only have pejorative strawman versions of, where you can't explain why they think what they think without making them dumb or bad, you should be dubious of your own modeling."
"If you feel a combination of outraged and very certain, with a strong enemy hypothesis orientation, you have been captured by somebody's narrative warfare, and you think it's your own thinking."
I really enjoyed the book Focus: Bringing Time, Energy, and Money into Flow by Pedram Shojai, O.M.D. It's a pretty quick and breezy read but it contains a lot of useful wisdom, particularly about the value of a meditation practice. As Shojai writes, "You are a creator dreaming a dream. How clear can you be, and how much amplitude can put behind the signal?"
I don't know about you, but I'm soaking up all the small comforts I can this winter, and good smells are high on the list. Saje makes lovely diffusers and amazing essential oil blends. I need to be cut off from ordering more. It's a problem. Maybe you'll join me down the rabbit hole. It smells real nice.
I'm wishing you all as much comfort and connection as possible in this oh so difficult holiday season. Please feel free to share this newsletter by forwarding it to those who might enjoy it, or by using the buttons below.
If you received this from a friend and want to subscribe, you can do so here.
Love and light to you and yours as we ride out the rest of this... vivid year.