“Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human. It is to transcend not only national limitations, but even our species isolation, to enter into the larger community of living species. This brings about a completely new sense of reality and value.”
Thomas Berry
During this time of the pandemic, I am feeling some of my deep fears while also experiencing a rousing of my deep impulse to connect. To wake up from all the ways I’ve been asleep, to enliven my connection to the whole of Everything.
The origin of the word heal literally means “to make whole.”
Our question is: how can we make ourselves whole?
It’s a personal question.
But it can’t just be personal. As soon as we begin to look inward, we are at the same time looking outward. Everything we do for ourselves, we do for the world.
So the best place to begin is to look within.
Sometimes it takes a crisis to realize we are broken. I remember when I was a new mom, struggling with sleep deprivation and falling apart at the seams, thinking “this is just life, I should be able to handle it.” My avoidance only thrust me deeper into a pit of depression, a dilemma of identity.
But something called me—it was my own siren song of wholeness. Yet all I could feel was its absence. Its terrible, terrible absence.
This is where I had to begin. In that abyss of absence.
To be human is to feel all the feelings.
I learned to sit. And when I was quiet, I could hear something other than the thoughts, “I should be this . . .” “This shouldn’t be happening . . .” “I am confined . . .”
I learned to hear my inner wisdom. Over time, I learned to be with this wisdom. To trust it. To keep making a space for it until it became my natural place of knowing. To relax my mind (the hardest thing of all . . . because it’s so used to being in charge).
To be human is to hold head and heart.
We, humans, have the unique position of following intuition and using our brain power. Now, to evolve our humanness we need to understand ourselves as a part of the whole, and play our part in keeping the balance (within ourselves and within the world).
When I look at what this virus is doing to our world, I get scared. To be human is to be vulnerable. It is to live and to die.
We don’t just want to live, we want to live fully, to be alive—this is human. Can’t you feel that right now? There is a shift, a turning towards home, to what matters.
When I look closer, I can see our vulnerability collide with our power to change. Our creativity rising, our connectivity spreading. I just returned from a bike ride round the neighborhood with my daughter. She will be thirteen next week. She loves riding with no hands, it’s her new thing. She made it two blocks! On our ride, we saw a dad and his teenage son tossing the ball in their front yard.