I spent time yesterday reading more Florence Scovel Shinn, and realized why I had put her books aside sometime in the 90's...her language is so traditional! Even back then, it caused too much of a disconnect. What is so fascinating is that her ideas are still forward-thinking; I'm so fond of re-writing things, and maybe this should be my next assignment!
There are many ways in which I was fine-tuned by the pandemic time, and one of them is that I became hyper-sensitive to conflict, both actual "fighting" and the vocabulary of conflict. I had started writing about this in my blog before the shutdown, but during this last year when my only source of information was nightly TV news, I got to the point where my physical body began to tense up, even just hearing about the "fight against COVID". (It was the language of fighting that did it, not thinking about the disease itself.) All the pandemic vocabulary was the vocabulary of war. Nurses and doctors were on the "front lines", battle lines were drawn (both in terms of how the disease would be dealt with, and politically, between those who were on board with public health recommendations and those who were not). Patients leaving the hospital sometimes wore tee shirts with sayings l like, "I beat COVID".
Last November, in my Goddess journal, this came through my pen: "I will never, ever ask you to fight for or against anything. Anything." This is pretty powerful stuff. The gist of it is, a fight response takes a person out of a place of love, and energetically pulls one down so that real "victory" is impossible. We may never know what would have happened if, societally, we had just said, "Ooh, interesting, a new virus" and gone on with our lives. And at this point, barring a huge spiritual and philosophical shift among humans, it may take many decades before we can approach a disease that fearlessly.
But perhaps this might be a good moment to consider, "What if the Divine One (however conceived) really wants us to stop fighting? -- each other, disease, nature, and animal life. What if we are being called to put aside all weapons, all wars, all disputes, all vocabulary of 'fight, fight, fight'? What if such pacifism was the only way to save the endangered Earth? Could we do it?"
Shinn addresses this in The Game of Life, sometimes using the word "resistance". "Resistance is Hell, for it places man in a 'state of torment'...so long as man resists a situation, he will have it with him. If he runs away from it, it will run after him." Basically, she says, face a situation calmly, call it "good", and it will dissolve. We have certainly gone through hell this last year or so. I tried to walk that fine line of honoring the medical field's recommendations while still, personally, practicing a mind frame of fearlessness. It is a challenging path, but not impossible.
