On my run yesterday I passed a young woman visiting her grandparents. They were tucked up comfortably on lawn chairs just outside their front door. She was sitting on a camping chair on the sidewalk, chatting and visiting with them. A lovely, normal and bizarre sight in the times of the modern plague year.
Here in my household we are preparing for Passover. This is a holiday that has some pretty weird echoes with our situation right now. I'll get back to that. For now, I'll say that all seven of us in our "nuclear" (read "nuclear explosions") family have different religious beliefs, ranging from atheist to secular, to very observant. I sit on the sidelines with my Earth Mama placard and my deep understanding of We as One and my conviction that Nature is a Terrible Beast and somehow tapestried into and with the Divine.
So there we go.
During the Passover Seder, we speak of the Jews' escape from their lives in Egypt to a brave new world across the desert. Themes such as plague, authority, compassion, cleanliness, restrictions, food, mathematics, and freedom enter into the evening, as well as concepts of what childhood means, how we categorize each other and our children, and most of all, Order. The whole evening follows a particular order that has been so since the beginning of the holiday, and we recite it at the beginning of the evening and we move through each step carefully.
Right now, we are living through a time where all of these themes are radically in play. I feel like I am spinning on the knife edge. Plague? We are living it. We have unleashed a plague upon ourselves that is killing many and creating confusion, suffering, and possibly a new order but possibly not.
Authority? Yes, authority is playing a big part in our lives right now. Do we do as the government asks? Do we believe them? Is it right for police to enter your house without a warrant? Who in a household has the right to tell others what to do, if everyone has different ideas about social distancing and hygiene? What do we tell or kids, when we have no control any more?
Compassion! Now is the time above all to be compassionate - to others, but also to ourselves. Ugly thoughts have swam up from my deeps over the past three weeks, I'm sure they've done the same for many. When someone acts with anger right now, try to drape them in light and move on. When you're had enough with yourself and want a break, take a walk outside of your mind and give yourself some compassion. Be compassionate of others; take social responsibility and keep your distance, wear a mask, stay healthy if you can.
Cleanliness! We are ordered to be clean! So before the Passover week we spend weeks cleaning the house, getting rid of breadcrumbs, making our living quarters sparkling clean. And now, even more so, during this pandemic, it is so important to be conscious of cleanliness. Wash your hands, as often as you can. Wipe stuff down, donate money to projects that are providing hand sanitizer and soap to marginalized communities. Don't touch your face, be conscious about what you bring into your house.
Restrictions: During the eight days of Passover, we are not supposed to eat any grain that can be leavened. And we eat Matzah which is a cracker made with flour and no yeast. These restrictions have been made light of, and they've been made heavier, depending on the personality of the people following them, or the religious establishment they belong to. You can actually go so far as to bleach your dentures (a true story) or you can just do a Seder on the first night and ignore it the rest of the time. That's the thing with religious restrictions in a liberal democracy: no one will cut off your head if you don't follow the rules. But actually, if you flagrantly ignore the restrictions put in place around Covid19, then there's a good chance that you and yours will get sick, and maybe even die.
Which is kind of creepy because it begs the question, that religious people might ask, whether following the earthly rules and not dying is more valuable than following the divine rules, getting sick, and dying. Conspiracy theorists also may follow this twisted logic. I figure, like I said a month ago, best to pray to Allah AND tie your damn camel to a tree.
Food! We eat ceremonial foods during the Seder, but we don't actually get to eat our meal until it's over, in our house that's usually around midnight at least. We prepare the food very carefully, washing it well. And of course our menu is completely changed around because we don't eat any grains or seeds. Zero. It's pretty interesting from a cooking point of view, and challenging. Luckily, since we are in stay-at-home mode, we have the wizard chef living in the basement ( his partner is in Italy, living through the plague there). And this year, everyone is cooking and experimenting with how to cook from scratch and make stuff you've been buying for years. Not only that, food and suffering has become a huge problem in places where every meal has to be struggled for. People are hungry, in Africa, in the Middle East, in Asia, and in your own back yard.
Mathematics? There's a weird couple of pages in the Seder book where we start talking about mathematically how many plagues there actually were the year the Jews escaped from slavery. The echoing across the centuries is bizarre: everyone is reading about statistical this and that: how are we flattening the curve? New cases? Deaths? Which country is better and why? Testing? What percent? Age groups?
And Freedom! Freedom? Where is our freedom? How is our freedom? From an illusion of freedom under advanced capitalism where many of us thought that freedom was about being able to buy stuff and experience stuff, we are being forced to recognize that we don't have any freedom at all, really. Some of us believe that the whole pandemic experience is being used to whittle away at our social freedoms. I don't believe that. I think everyone is scared shitless, and they're all just scrambling.
I do know, however, that my most frightening and scary times were the times when I experienced a sort of freedom, and those moments were the ones when my intense conviction that there is a Creator, there is a purpose, my purpose is love .... when that conviction was born. And giving birth to a deep knowledge is no less painful and ecstatic than giving birth to a human. When I wandered, alone, in the mountains when I was very young, I was afraid, but I also knew that my survival was not in my hands. Was the moose who walked next to me with its calf taking care of me? Possibly. Was anything taking care of me? Possibly not.
I don't know what's going to happen. If I'm going to get sick and die. If we all are (unlikely, says the scientist in me). I'm lucky, I've had a huge life so far. You don't know what's going to happen either, so dig deeper, and find yourself. Give to others, break your rules. Stay home. Stay healthy. Call a friend.
Dive down, people. It's all we have. Love each other. Embrace the tumbling down of all the things you knew to be true. #spreadthelove #freedom
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