Living with Uncertainty

A good deal of our work in Trillium Awakening is about “greenlighting,” saying yes to what is arising. It’s tied deeply into our way to Trust in Being, to radically embrace who and how and what we are in any given moment. The path to realizing consciousness leads us to live in uncertainty, to embody the paradox that we are simultaneously finite and infinite, both and.

The recent spread of the Corona virus around the world in places many of us live or are visiting or desiring to go is asking us to deeply embrace both not knowing and our inner knowing to follow the way that Being leads us. My impending spring break was meant to culminate in a long overdue trip to visit family in the Bay Area. Today, that’s been canceled, first by our own leaning in to whether it’s really okay for us to fly and then be in public with any number of potentially affected people, and then by Sugandhi’s son who felt we’d better not come. I was invited to participate in a weekend long poetry prowl in a nearby city: canceled. The library, community center, gallery, and all local K-12 schools and colleges are closed, even though, so far as we know, there are no confirmed cases of the virus in our sparsely populated county of 7 people per square mile.

But people move, and they take all of themselves with them—even the invisible parts such as microscopic bacteria that cause illness. So it makes sense to be proactive and stay home. Sugandhi and I are especially blessed to have sought out a place of isolation in the expansive North Cascade Mountains in a town of 900. Still, we have family who have recently traveled to California, a grandchild returning from her closed school in LA. Do we ask them to quarantine themselves for two weeks before we see them? What happens if family members become ill? Do we leave them alone to fend for themselves? Of course not! There’s a way in which it would make more sense for us to all quarantine ourselves together. To wait it out and see if anyone gets sick. We’re not likely to do that, but it illustrates the balance that we need in responding to this pandemic. We need to be safe, take precautions, and prepare for the worse, whatever that looks like: closed stores, insufficient supplies of food and household goods. At the same time, we can still come together in small groups in safety with discernment. We can also be present for what is happening in the wider world. Hold compassion. Be of service to those in need, the elderly or housebound or quarantined.

Mutuality is an alchemical process. If we can speak our fears, the deep, primal call to survive no matter what, and the old survival strategies that arise out of them, then we can land more deeply into what it means to be human. We are all dying, every moment of every day. We can honor that best by living fully in the moment whatever is arising. When we awaken to our fully embodied realization, we are called to walk the way of the mobius strip, to ride the infinite curve of the inner and the outer realms of Consciousness, to be what we are, finite and infinite and living in these temporary, vulnerable, precious, miraculous human bodies.