Fear Colours Reality
Ducked down to the local farmers market this morning, expecting to see a sad ghost town with nothing lingering but the grey fog of fear and the despair of more community members uncertain of their futures but was instead greeted with the gleeful vibrancy of a community supporting it's community. Sending smiles across their two metre sensible distancing, air high fiving and bumping bottoms in place of the boring old handshake. This journey, like all, is a highly individual one and your strength within it is going to be drawn from whatever decision comes with a sense of peace in your heart. That will be different from person to person - a place where science and spirituality hopefully overlap. The data tells us that the vulnerable need to be isolated and in this isolation, protected. So what then is the role for the rest of us that best supports the vulnerable and in not creating more vulnerability? Whether we like it or not, agree or disagree, we are living in a framework that is supported by money as the central exchange. Movements away from that are best done gently and intelligently so as not to create a tsunami of poverty. Time given to adjust. We are in a very wonderful position in so many ways - we are able to view the scenarios from other countries, an opportunity that the countries first hard hit never had, we get to do it from all the way over here - on an island. We have a chance to act from intelligence rather than fear, taking into consideration that protecting each other also means supporting each other to not fall into unnecessary financial hardship. Poverty and poor health have a very renowned and close knit toxic relationship. Right now I am witnessing so many people we deeply care about unnecessarily impacted financially as people allow themselves to be frozen in fear, in just one week looking at the reality that they may lose their businesses and their homes. Whilst we all may have discovered through this that what exists at the centre of our weary adult hearts, is a fatigue so deep from years, decades of having to run faster and faster on the hamster wheel just to maintain the status quo, that lockdown sounds like a delightful, most wondrous of ideas but perhaps this is not the time yet for those who are strong and healthy to stop? Perhaps part of our service is to keep going, keep supporting, so that the genuinely vulnerable can come back into a world that's not all burning cars and looting but a thriving, loving place that grabbed adult common sense in both hands, along with a frequent bar of soap.
On the topic of closing schools, whilst it's a wonderful idea for some families to close schools and have their children at home - for us it's a beautiful poetic notion because we're in a position of place, love and business to support that - but I can't help but ponder all those children in highly dangerous abusive situations domestically. What will happen to those children in lock down in violent or neglectful homes, with parents under even more emotional stress than ever before? Are our thoughts with them or maintaining our own empires? Not a single case has been recorded within a QLD school and very few nation or worldwide, yet still there are calls for closure in spite of knowing that this move would make thousands of children vulnerable to things far worse than covid-19.
These are complex times but they can be simplified to some basic truths, one being that fear is extinguished through acts of service. Those acts will look different for all of us but I deeply believe, that if that is at the very least the filter through which we make all of our decisions, we will witness some beautiful things cultivated from this extraordinary time.