What can I say? There’s nothing like invoking ‘Happiness’ and ‘Softness’ to trigger in me the lamentations of the ages. Sobs, and bafflements, and pains have been flowing through me. I can barely look at the world out there. I can hardly look at the world in here.
A purging time, isn’t it, dear friend?
It really is. Yesterday at least 950 people died with Covid19 in the UK. We overtook Italy and Spain in highest daily death toll. These screen shots of Guardian and BBC front pages today don’t do the situation justice…
This is a world of so much pain. We had been accustomed to it. But sit still in your house, with no distractions, and no busy-ness – and the tenderness of being alive at this time sweeps over you in palpating waves. I’m glad to be awake to it. I’m grateful for it. But, really, I feel the need to know that this is actually part of the shift of all ages…
And it is.
How do you know?
What happened yesterday? For you?
AV and I went to Bath for the first time since Lockdown began, to go shopping in Waitrose… so we could see LV, my daughter and AV’s sister…whom we haven’t seen since Lockdown began. We did not take this lightly as we have been extremely diligent about social distancing, and consider doing so highly importantly. We coordinated timings. You’re only meant to have one person per household go in, so (and forgive us if this was wrong) AV and I split the shopping list, and queued for entry separately. LV was shopping inside. When I saw her – talking at a safe 2m from AV by the vegetables – I burst in to tears. To see both my girls together. To see my little girl in person for the first time in so long. My heart nearly burst.
Your heart nearly burst.
It did.
You have stumbled upon the key aspect of this momentous time. Everyone’s hearts are fit to burst. The empathy, compassion and tenderness arising in the collective consciousness is like at no other time. Not even during the war, when there was a sense of the ‘enemy’. Now, there is no enemy. Just circumstance.
We (some) would make our governments to be the ‘enemy’, and seek to hold them account for their slowness in responding to a situation they could have acted upon earlier…
Errors, errors, errors. Humans make errors.
But ‘herd immunity’?! Didn’t they plan just to let the vulnerable take the hit?!
Underestimating the value of human life is a human error.
Assuming an economy has more value than a human life is a human error.
Hoping a situation will go away because the actual data tells you it will, is a human error.
I’m torn because on the one hand I want to turn rebuttals on this – it’s too easy for our ‘leaders’ to shrug their shoulders and deny/purport “error”; or for us to excuse them by saying ‘They’re human too!’. On the other hand, I am conscious of my human errors. Substantial human errors. I’ve had cause to think this week about how unmerciful we are towrds each other’s errors on this planet. We make people live with their errors for a life time. We are so unforgiving.
I worked this week with someone who has experienced acute suicidality for some ten years. I discovered (by my own googling) that he was once a high-profile person and in the course of his important work, he made a error of professional judgment. This error was publicised by the media and by his profession. Ten years ago. Here is this person, ten years on, still living to make amends for that error, on the edge of life and death… when the condemning journalists would barely be able even to remember his name. Would the person affected by his error really want him to be experiencing suicidal thinking ten years later?
Anyway, what has this all to do with shifting?
The route to the shift is forgiveness, of self and of other.
Like JC who came to forgive us our sins. (It’s Easter Saturday today.)
Mercy is no lofty ideal. It is intrinsic to making this planet coherent.
For a person to be merciful – to forgive – to transmute hate and blame into compassion and love – what must occur first?
The heart must open… We must become open-hearted. And that’s what is happening now? That’s what Covid19 is doing to us? Making us open-hearted?
You say ‘open-hearted’. We say ‘heart-centred’.
Beautiful. Yes. I dig that. Tell me more about ‘heart-centred’.
The Heart-Centred paradigm is the Next Big Thing.
Aha? In what way?
#BeKind is a ripple in this new ocean.
It arose out of loss. (The suicide of Caroline Flack.)
It arose out of loss.
Is that the only way we can learn how to love, by losing what we take for granted? Health, friends, loved ones, cultural icons…
It is not so much that you take these things ‘for granted’ but that you assume they are permanent fixtures in your life. Life is about impermanence. The only way to tolerate impermanence (without toppling over with grief or frustration or anxiety) is… by finding one’s heart centre.
Tell me about my heart centre.
Physiologically it is in your chest. Etherically it is at the higher frequencies. Energetically, it is just in front of your sternum.
And how do I become more heart-centred?
You are invited to turn up the frequencies in your heart centre so that they hum.
Excuse me? So I can understand?
Consider impermanence. That will make your heart hum. It will make your heart hum if you consider not the loss in impermanence, but the value in ‘what is’ when all is impermanent. See the freshness of what is, anew. As Goethe said.
Ah yes… Let me find that twitter screenshot I took earlier…
The whole screenshot sums up this current situation in so many ways:
“LIVE EACH DAY AS IF YOUR LIFE HAD JUST BEGUN.” Goethe
This is about awe, wonder, marvel. That is the heart-centred state.
Like a baby…
The innocence of the baby, and the receptivity of the baby. The freshness of its sight.
I see. And for today…?
Value what is, right here, right now. Endeavour to see it for what it is. A marvel. This will lift your heart, and make it hum. Marvel at what you see.
Marvel at what you see.
************
I did marvel at what I saw – in fact we (G&I) even got out binoculars. I marvelled at:
- A Great Tit resting in the dust
- Buzzards on the upward breezes
- Dappled sunlight on bluebells
- The beauty of my beloved G.
- The nobility of my beautiful A.
- Pictures of my precious nieces
Hm… everything I marvelled at was living. Living things are marvellous. Maybe in part, because they are – oh my heart – impermanent.