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Shelter, is a song by one of my favorite artists, Ray Lamontagne. In it he sings, "If you'll shelter me, I'll shelter you." I've always loved the words because I felt there was nothing greater than someone offering shelter and all the images that word incorporates.
The United States is hanging in a space between what was and what might be, and right now, shelter would be a welcome word on the tongue. Never has there been a time where it felt the stakes were higher. The world watches and waits, sees that in America the states aren't very united anymore.
Alcohol sales this year have gone through the roof. Drinking has become more than a social contract or a party endeavor. It has been embraced as a necessity for sanity. Jokes are flung back and forth on Twitter about it day and night. The year 2020 — sponsored by wine everywhere.
But the laughs die down when the night grows long and the ruptures of this year deepen in the dark. We don't know how to fix what has gone off the rails. COVID-19, officially known as SARS-CoV-2, has racked our population. The death toll continues climbing and positive infections have reached a new high of 120,000 in one day. My friends from high school post that they are sick or that they have just lost a spouse, who was healthy, to the virus and they feel they have to add, "This is not a joke. This is real. The virus is real." And that's where we've fallen through the cracks.
Many believe the media can't be trusted - ANY of the media - or anyone else. They've shut their doors to their friends and their hearts to family members who disagree with them. Entire generations have been broken, shattered over disagreements about how we shall continue to protect the basic necessities we desire for our lives. Life, liberty, freedom, the pursuit of happiness.
I've watched it unfold the entire year through. I've tried to keep my tone neutral while I supported my ideals, I've held my tongue, prayed for the best for everyone. For the entire world. When I mentioned the extent of the virus in February to a friend and how it would affect our upcoming plans for the year, she politely asked me if I knew of someone who had the virus. Yes, I did.
I knew that elderly woman in China I had witnessed on the internet begging someone to please come help her because her husband was dying and she was desperately trying to save him. When the virus jumped to Italy, I watched people crying because they couldn't get to their loved ones as they were carried away to die alone and I felt that I knew them. I listened to the priest who was tortured over the fact that he couldn't visit the sick or offer last rites and I knew him, too. I watched the bodies as they were piled up and carried away in military vehicles because there were so many and nowhere to bury them. Yes, I knew those people. They were human just like me.
In the beginning of our sheltering in place, I watched the large figure of Christ on the hilltop in Brazil as it was lit up in a symbol of solidarity, illuminated with the flags of every country that had people infected. In those first few days, it seemed we were all caught in a hush, a feeling that magnified our mortality and forced us to appreciate the lives of those most dear to us. The moments became precious as we were stripped down to value what was of the greatest importance. New shoes or the latest gadget didn't matter as long as we had each other. "Alone together" became the hashtag of the year.
Hurricanes assailed us, fires burned out of control, fear gripped the nation. Protesters took to the streets to protest George Floyd's needless death. And in that moment, there was solidarity and there was judgement and there was misinformation and there was power, and in the midst of it all, the gap that held us in limbo widened even farther.
I read an article recently about how politics had poisoned family relationships in the U.S. A son who supported Trump told his mother she could no longer see her grandchildren because he didn't want them tainted by her leftist political ideology. Young couples who couldn't stand what they perceived as the absolute loss of democracy and the proliferation of an ideology that supported white supremacy broke ties with their parents and grandparents. Passions flared, and the chasm grew wider. Friends and family, brothers and sisters, cousins — all ripped apart in a matter of weeks after living their entire lives together.
I’ve been studying Dante's Divine Comedy consisting of the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. It felt like we were trapped in limbo like those in Dante’s Purgatory, not one place or the other, but desperately seeking a way forward. The isolation and the anger over the situation grew more magnified by the day.
The author, C.S. Lewis reflected that each day we were becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror. We've all taken sides in the United States. Both sides believe the other to be possessed by an unspeakable evil. That’s a blanket statement but it’s close to the spot-on truth. Emotions are running high. We're tired, strung out and for those who have lost their families due to COVID-19 or have been separated over political issues – this year has isolated us beyond measure.
And I wonder, did it have to come to this? Was there a time when we could have stopped this destructive imbalance? If words spoken could be erased, or words left unsaid would have been spoken - words like - I love you beyond the uncertainties of our current dilemmas - perhaps many families, friends, and neighbors wouldn’t be facing life-long ruptures in their relationships.
This summer my cousin found a little bird's nest in the strangest of places. It was wedged behind a pillow on a swing in my backyard. And it was filled with tiny blue eggs. I couldn't imagine why a wild bird would choose such a place. My house is surrounded by trees of every size. Surely, there were better options. But, regardless of my opinion on the matter, there it was. The mother had chosen this spot as refuge. A week passed and the eggs hatched, and the four, featherless, baby birds arrived.
Thunder woke me one night when a large storm rolled in. I realized the rain would pour down behind the pillow, and drown the baby birds. I got up, pulled on a rain slicker, and went out around midnight in the wind, wrestling a patio umbrella, putting it up and propping and securing it over the pillow. Rain slicker aside, I came in drenched anyway. The rain had been blowing in every direction. From that night on, it was my responsibility to shelter these tiny creatures from their vulnerabilities. Their feathers came in, they sang, ate, grew, flew away.
Where now might we each find shelter from the storm in this land of political, social, and physical limbo? Can some deep-seated spiritual intuition lead us to a place of rest, and provide us with a starting line to make room for agreement. I am thankful we have had distractions — easy entertainment at the ready like the latest, episode of excellent series, The Queen's Gambit. We've had that second (or third) glass of wine. That malicious fun of venting on Twitter, posting on Facebook. But if we were to really seek shelter for our souls so that we don't just become another cog in the machine that is part of the milieu – where will we go?
This is a moment in time, and it behooves us to realize that time will move forward. That is what time does. The desperate pause we are experiencing due to pandemic, due to the electoral process of democracy, and due to wide political variances of opinion, well, it cannot remain. Time will not leave us at this precipice. It cannot. Our world is ancient. And we shall evolve with each sunrise and sunset, with each rotation of the planet, on the journey of our path of becoming more aware and fully human. Author and entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuck said it best in a short video posted right after he voted, which I paraphrase here: We will grow tired of hating each other. We will get beyond this moment.
I'm searching for ways that I can center my soul. where I can then quietly, in confidence, with grace move toward the year 2021 with a deeper understanding of where I've been and a determination to focus on where I'm going. I believe each of us knows in their heart of hearts what they need to do to set the internal imbalance of stress and frustration in order. Considering my total perspective in relation to time, speed, distance, and space is one of the ways that I adjust myself, and in doing so, am finding my way out of limbo.
We are all traveling this day 19,200 miles in 24 hours. Over the course of the year ahead of us, our revolution around the Sun will have taken us on a star-studded roundtrip 584 million miles long at a speed of 67,000 miles per hour. We are moving farther and faster every second than most of us can really fully comprehend.
So, if that feeling of being frozen in time seems to be suffocating us, if the fences we have built between us and everyone who doesn’t agree with us have grown so high we’re trapped in a box of our own making, we might want to take a deep breath and realize we are sailing through our galaxy in constant motion. All of us on this one, single, planet. And from a great distance, it's possible to see past the pain and strife of 2020 to the unequivocal truth, that we are all traveling through the corridors of time on the same planet and, yes, we are in this together.
