When I got up this morning and saw the news bulletin on my phone that Trump announced last night that he and Melania have tested positive for COVID-19, my immediate and instinctual response was concern for them both. Empathy, I suppose. Even though I disagree with Trump’s positions on, well, just about everything, I do not wish him ill. In fact, I wish him wholeness.
But along with the empathy, this morning I feel exhaustion. I think many of us do. This has been grueling. The body-blows that the daily news delivers are almost more than we can handle. Day. After day. After day. After day. It has been relentless.
What I’m noticing, though, is that the exhaustion I feel doesn’t seem like it belongs to “me.” It feels like a collective exhaustion that is in the collective energy field.
It’s as if we’re trying to hold back a tsunami—frantically trying to plug the cracks that keep opening up in the dikes—to keep the world we’ve known from being inundated by a force that seems so much bigger than we are.
The small self becomes terrified, believing that this tsunami is the power of evil that is threatening to take over the world. But the wiser Self knows that what’s really happening is an immense in-breaking of Love.
Our consciousness is being pummeled with the undeniable truth of our oneness—from burning forests, to melting glaciers, to a virus that will not leave us alone. We are trying so very hard to hold back this irrefutable evidence, to reassert our insularity. We are so desperately clinging to our ideas of “other,” of “enemy,” of “judgment,” all of our tried and true ways of maintaining our mind’s illusion of separateness.
But maintaining an illusion is exhausting, especially one of this magnitude. It requires an enormous amount of energy to deny the undeniable and to keep at bay the obvious: that we are inextricably interconnected, and there’s not a thing we can do about it.
All of the current ginning up of division and hatred and polarization is the psyche’s last ditch effort to salvage the dikes and keep its egoic illusion in place, but it’s a lost cause. We just don’t have what it takes to hold back Reality.
The day is coming when we will collapse, exhausted by this Herculean effort. And on that day we will discover that what we have collapsed into is the arms of Love—and we will also finally understand that’s where we were all along.
As for myself, I just don’t have the energy to plug the dikes anymore. I simply couldn’t muster what it takes to hate, even if I wanted to. So instead I’m just going to sit here on the sofa for awhile, with my mug of blueberry tea, and rest. And pray.
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How comforting this is to me, Patricia. How insightful and assuring. Your voice is a shining place where Life reveals Itself as ever-present Love and Intelligence.
I am grateful!
Love, Ann
This is beautiful, Patricia. Thank you.
Thank you, Patricia. You have here expressed what I’ve been feeling but couldn’t articulate. Especially resonant with me was your comment that you cannot “muster what it takes to hate.” What’s been wearing me down the most lately is all the hatred, vitriol, and toxicity being flung around, almost with abandon or as if it’s the only way to be right now. Your post here is most comforting, and it offers me hope.
I am with you right there on that couch to witness the power of love coming to sooth our exhausted souls bringing with it light and grace.
Thank you, Rev.
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Blessings to the trumps~~
I really liked this post. In a wonderful instance of synchronicity, I picked up my copy of Michael Mendizza’s, “Magical Parent – Magical Child” and found this quote from O. Fred Donaldson, Ph.D. – the author of “Playing by Heart”:
“We have been programmed for so long, not only as Americans, but as human beings, to believe that fight/flight, survival of the fittest, and competition is the only way to be.
When you experience that love and belonging are the most important things, not just as an idea, not just to be nice, but in a very tangible way, the question becomes, how do I live that way, moment by moment? That experience changes everything. Once you’re safe and not dissipating your energy in self-defense, then it’s much easier to communicate, to love, to be kind and do all those things we’d really rather do than hurt and defend …”
“The most important thing I’ve experienced … is that I “belong” to the universe. … By learning that we all belong, I’m no longer afraid of the differences. Differences are there for me to learn how to be fully human and to share that with every other form on earth. That’s very powerful and it literally places me in the midst of the universe.”
Such a soothing voice. It makes me want to sit on your couch, snuggle up next to you and share that cup of tea.