I remember writing an essay that deeply resembles this one.. but in my own voice and tone…

And the mystery of what actually occurred haunts me to this day… though the circumstances… were both simpler and stranger… than those herein evinced.

But the thing that really bothers me, is this:

does facebook, as a machine, have the analogical state of ‘knowing’ this…

… and is that what led me here?

Because this… is the perfect bomb.

•••

“Coronavirus, DAY 14: I still have a sore throat, and some coughing. The heaviness/constriction in my chest still persists. No appetite. Food tastes like nothing. I guess some people have symptoms this long, question mark.

I am quarantining in a remote riverside cottage graciously provided to me by a family friend.
Prior to this I had no permanent home. I gave up my adorable little Ohio homestead in 2018 to drop out and just wander around until I figured something out that felt like an appropriate response to the ecological crisis.

I had finished up a house sit in Seattle, WA in early March (where I most likely picked up the virus) and was driving back to Ohio to visit my parents. But my mom has a compromised immune system and so even though I wasn’t showing symptoms yet we decided its best that I quarantine somewhere before going to their house. And it was good that I did because I do believe I have it, but there is no way to know for sure until I get tested though.

~~~

I have done some hard things in my life (at least they felt hard to me). I’ve spent considerable time completely alone. I’ve done 20 day water fasts. I walked to the Gulf of Mexico from Ohio by myself sleeping outside without a tent along the way. I lived in the water protector camps at Standing Rock for 4 months. I took care of a suicidal friend once. I took care of a partner with cancer who also was incredibly abusive to me. I have worked long exhausting Fall days as an apple picker and cold winter days as an apple tree pruner. I lived for years in a 10′ x 10′ cabin in New Hampshire with no electricity or running water. And perhaps the most challenging of all, I’ve worked at my parent’s Garden Center in the spring WITH my family, lol.

But never have I experienced such a difficult, trying time as these last couple of weeks! Good Lord Almighty! If I can get through this I feel like I can do ANY-fucking-THING!
I mean, normally I am MADE to quarantine…..but now, YIKES.

I usually don’t share personal stuff on FB but now I’m going to just go full frontal TMI on you all, in hopes that getting it all out in writing will help me find my way back to Sanesville.
*
*
*
I am a white hot mess right now.

The day, or actually the HOUR my virus symptoms starting showing up I received news that a just blossoming new relationship was ending already (the timing of the coinciding of these two things is strange to say the least). It was so new that we had only seen each other in person once. Mostly we had just been private messaging….like BIGTIME messaging, it was a tsunami of messaging. You think my POSTS are long? You have no idea.
And we had tentative plans to meet again in early April but *SIGH*, not now.

And it would seem I am not taking all this very well, lol.
I certainly have a newfound sympathy for people under the spell of Eros. Jesus! This is powerful shit, man! It is RRRRROUGH! I feel IN-fucking-SANE. I cannot stop mulling the whole thing over in my head. My heart feels like it’s been pounded with meat tenderizer. And its all being exacerbated by the fact that I’m sick and alone and I’m in the middle of nowhere with no internet connection (I’m in my car on the deserted Kenyan College Campus right now) so have nothing to really distract myself with. There’s a cd player at the cottage but it skips, plus most of the CDs here are James Taylor live albums (if the government is looking for a new way to torture people they should try forcing someone to listen to a skipping bootleg version of ‘You’ve Got A Friend’)
Normally I would LOVE being alone without technology. But now I’m like why doesn’t this fucking dvd player have the right cord so I can watch ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ five times in a row!

I just feel especially crazy and obsessive because it really was such a short lived thing and nothing progressed past a first date, so why can’t I just get over it?????
Maybe because it really felt like there was SO much potential there which is so fucking rare for me, so so rare.
I feel like I just instantly recognized him as a member of my tribe or something, which does not happen to me often. I could see ancient traces of myself in his eyes. The sound of his voice vibrated at some magical frequency in my eardrum. (See what I mean??? “Ancient traces of myself”???…Shut up! Man, have I got it BAD!)

But it was cut short. There was SO much more I wanted to ask him and tell him and show him! Fuck! Now I have all this energy that I had generated during it and no where to direct it or put it. It’s eating me alive! I think of that Leonard Cohen line “Take this longing from my tongue, all the lonely things these hands have done.”

But for all of you that have been rooting for my love life all these years- Man alive, I got close you guys, real close….at least it felt that way! Maybe not, I don’t know. Maybe I made it up, read into it way too much because I am so friggin’ hungry for some kind of connection.
But goddamn, was he fine! Mmm! Hotchie Motchie! Just that perfect combo of handsome and dorky, you know?

When it first began I felt as if I was in some wildly romantic musical because I’ve just never felt that way before!
I was singing showstopping numbers with ambitious titles like…

‘This Time Will Be Different!’
‘There’s No Effing Way He’s Not Into Me!’
‘Nothing Can Possibly Foil This!’

But then was suddenly met with sad solos from him such as

‘I’ve Been Really Busy with Work’
‘I Like You…But’
‘We Can Still Be Friends’.

Now I’m bawling out ballads like…

‘Where Did I go Wrong?’
‘What’s She Got That I Haven’t Got???’
‘Time to Cry on the Floor Again’….
plus Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep’ because that’s just a really good song.

I thought when I first arrived at this idyllic romantic waterfront bungalow that maybe he could visit me here. I had such high hopes this place would be my own personal Love Shack but now it has become a Den of Sorrow and Plague, lol.

The whole thing started so suddenly and intensely that I guess it makes sense that it burned out so fast. I’ve got to learn to pace myself!
I know I’m acting like I’m the only person in the world this has ever happened to, lol, which is also adding to the annoying self obsessing ridiculousness of it all. But seriously, why oh why is this so freakin’ hard??? God, it stings! I mean, I barely know this person! What in the name of Tina Turner’s Proud Mary is going on here???

Did I get too attached too fast? (Ummm, YEP). We opened up with one another SO hard and so quickly, it was so weird but so exciting and fun and easy. We had SO much in common, which is saying A LOT because I barely have anything in common with anyone. I told him things I had never told anyone!!!!! It was crazy! But it felt right at the time, it felt natural. I trusted him. But maybe I trust too easily? (Ummm, YEP). But also I probably let myself fantasize way too much, got way too ahead of myself. So I know part of the anguish I’m feeling is for a fantasy or a story about him, about the prospect of “us”, not really about him per se. I mean I guess that is what is going on. I don’t really know! Maybe that’s bullshit because I really did feel like I just knew right away how I felt about him and that’s never happened to me before but I guess he just didn’t feel that way or not to the extent I did or he just feels more of that feeling for some other lucky chick. Aaah! I’m so confused.

This feels like a test and I feel like I am failing! I thought I was a relatively strong person! But I feel so weak and crazy right now! PLEASE if anybody out there in FB Land has gone thru this please do dish on how you got over it, my God, this is THE PITS……

…..Except its NOT in comparison!!!! There is a global pandemic going on that is really really negatively impacting people everywhere and here I am in my posh little cottage pining melodramatically over some silly boy that I BARELY knew like a self centered character in a Victorian novel! I am so fucking lucky and privileged to have this place to quarantine. I think about those stuck in apartments in cities who can’t go outside. I think about the essential workers out there working so hard, like grocers and nurses and delivery people and my amazing cousin who is a pharmacist.
And all the people who don’t have the luxury to social distance- in prisons, in ICE detention centers, in highly populated places.
And the powers that be in this goddamn country are going to leverage this virus for further “ethnic cleansing”. We are already seeing this in places like New Orleans and Michigan and the poorest parts of NYC. Its going to be like Katrina or Flint, MI on steroids.

But it’s so hard for me to hold on to any perspective while in the midst of this. I just don’t know how to not be a wallowing asshole right now! Fuck me.
It reminds me of that part in the book ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ where Elizabeth Gilbert relays how we as humans are primarily relational beings, we can’t help it, even when faced with great external tragedies we still obsess about relationships…

“I have a friend, Deborah, a psychologist, who was asked by the city of Philadelphia if she could offer psychological counseling to Cambodian refugees…boat people, who had recently arrived in the city. Deborah was daunted by the task. These Cambodians….had suffered genocide, starvation, relatives murdered before their eyes….years in refugee camps, harrowing boat trips to the West. How could she relate to their suffering? How could she help these people? So guess what all these people wanted to talk about with my friend Deborah, the psychologist. It was all, “I met this guy in the refugee camp. I thought he really loved me, but when we got separated… he took up with my cousin. Now he says he loves me…and keeps calling me. They’re married now. What should I do?” This is how we are.”

So I never really could fully relate to this passage.
But I sure the fuck do now!!!!

But the thing is I feel like I have so much to give to a partner. And not just to a partner but to a community, to a world…but in the context of this highly dysfunctional modern industrial civilization we are all born into it can be very hard to know how to truly give yourself in ways that actually help dismantle these horrendous oppressive systems we live by and help build a better world in its place. Because these unnatural systems, systems we are not designed for, have got us all jacked up and whacked out. Part of the problem is that people often either don’t know how to properly receive (because of poor self worth or pride) or they don’t know how to take without taking advantage, and don’t or can’t give anything back. We are all such a mess (except for maybe Rupaul). It’s not really our fault, the social conditioning/brainwashing is so powerful. Its like we all have PTSD from just being born into a culture that deprives us of so much of what makes us human animals, of what our DNA was expecting to be here waiting for us:
a healthy tribe, a healthy environment, and healthy relationships that are all interdependent of one another.
We are not evolved to deal with any of this modern bullshit. We can adapt and make due but that’s not the same, it just doesn’t cut it. Our incredible ability as a species to adapt has allowed us to tolerate and normalize some very horrendous things. And in all this adapting we must do to cope with such a strange world that our ancient selves do not recognize we become more and more traumatized and dysfunctional and deranged, while putting up with ever more insanity.

This toxic culture is predicated on the fact that we remain selfish and greedy OR go to the opposite extreme and become incredibly selfless where we just give and give and give so much of ourselves away hoping it gets us what we need until there is nothing left (hello moms). So relationships are up against a lot. We are wired/ evolved to live in small close knit tribes where couples were born out of the tribe and relied on the tribe, aided and added value to the tribe. Couples are not meant to exist without the support and context of a tribe. It puts a lot of pressure on the couple to be everything to one another, things the tribe once provided (The work of Esther Perel goes into this, check her out)

But then screw all that. Geez Louise one thing I can’t stop lamenting is how much I regret not kissing him when I had the chance, not that it would have made a difference in how things turned out but just to have the experience for fucking once in my life of kissing someone I was really really like super duper head over heals gonzo got the hots for, just so I could feel like a real human girl for once! Shit!

And during the short lived experience I felt so attractive and sexy even, he made me feel that way.

Now I have coronavirus, there are 3 gargantuan pimples on my face. I can’t remember when I showered last and I look a million years old.

I HATE that my self esteem and body image is tied up in what a man thinks. I don’t really know how to stop this from being the case.

~~~
There is this young male robin here who EVERY DAY for several hours attacks who he thinks is a rival male but in fact is just his own reflection in the window. He only stops after his feathers are falling out and he is exhausted, probably feeling so defeated. “You won this round” he says to no one as he flies off to recover, wondering how in the hell his foe is able to anticipate his every move. (Yes, I tried covering the window but he just moved on to a different window that I can’t reach)

Like this Robin are we just hopeless victims of our hormones? Of the involuntary evolutionary chemical processes going on within us? Once these processes helped us survive and thrive but now, in the context of this shiny artificial world they are only hurting us, making us our own worse enemy. How different are we from the Robin really, who has no evolutionary reference point for a glass window? Our brains are big enough to ascertain that when we see a reflection of ourselves that its not someone else, its us.
But do we really fully grasp this?

Maybe mirrors are where it all went wrong.

We stopped looking to others to reflect back to us who we are, and instead relied on highly polished sand to tell us. But there is nothing there to tell in such a superficial industrialized lifeless reflection. We have so many reflective surfaces but less self awareness than ever.

And we ourselves have stopped being reflective.

~~~

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the lungs and grief
….well not A LOT, as you can see I’ve mostly been thinking about him, about his hands and eyes and voice. Fuck. I remember back when I was housesitting in Seattle and we were first starting to correspond I was reading on FB this beautiful piece of writing he wrote to his mother on Mothers Day and it was making me cry and I happened to look over at the cat who was curled up next to me and she gave me this look as if to say “You are in such trouble.” I should’ve known then I was falling too hard too fast! Cats fuckin’ know, man!
Anyways back to the lungs.

In Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) all of the organs are associated with an emotion. The lungs deal with grief. So according to TCM if someone is having lung issues it is the result of not dealing with one’s grief properly, either grieving too much or refusing to grieve when grieving is needed.
This culture has a staggering, immeasurable amount of unprocessed grief, both collective and personal. This virus is giving us the opportunity to really take the time to grieve.

What is there to grieve you ask?

How about that with almost every action you take you are contributing to the degradation, disrespect and destruction of our collective Mother. You are alive during a time of inconceivable loss, whether you understand that intellectually or not there is a part of you that feels it and is in constant turmoil because that part of you that wants the destruction to stop doesn’t know what to do to stop it.
People and groups and organizations around the world have worked and fought tirelessly to stop the murder of our Mother but to no avail, the situation has only worsened.

95% of old growth forests are gone.

Since 1970, wildlife populations have decreased by 60%.

Flying insect populations are down 75% since the 1990’s.

Of all land mammals in existence only FOUR PERCENT are wild animals, the other 96% are humans and our domesticated animals. This is an alien invasion and we modern humans are the aliens, clueless as to how this whole Earth thing works.

In the last 150 years we have lost 50% of all top soil, at the current rate of loss there will be no top soil in 50 years or less.

In the last 40 years a third of all arable land has been lost to desertification.

In the last 30 years half the world’s coral reefs have been obliterated.

Half of the original Everglades are gone resulting in a 90% reduction in wading bird species.

8 million tons of plastic goes into the ocean every year, that’s one garbage truck every minute.

1 in 3 sea turtles have unsafe amounts of plastic in their sea turtle bellies.

Glacier National Park used to have 150 glaciers, now there are 26, soon there will be none.

Greenland is melting 4 times faster than it was just 16 years ago.

Last time there was this little ice in the Arctic humans did not exist yet.

Since 1900, at least 90 Indigenous tribes in Brazil alone have been wiped out.

One to two acres of rainforest are lost EVERY SECOND.

And to think of the knowledge of the natural world we have lost that we used to all have- The average American child can recognize 1000 corporate logos but cannot identify even 10 plant or animal species native to their bio-region.

So nothing has been able to stop or even slow this destruction and loss.
Then the Cornavirus crashes onto the scene and is able to stop us and shake us in a way that no revolutionary, no politician, no movement, no religion, no philosophy, no event ever has.

And I believe its message is this:
STOP AND LOOK AND GRIEVE.

We got the stopping part going but will we take this time to look? Look long enough to feel?
We have so much backlogged grief we have not let ourselves feel because we weren’t taught how to grieve properly, we are scared of our grief. But we can’t be afraid. Look at this Rumi poem written centuries ago, he knew not to fear grief. And part of you knows too….

~~~
“Your grief for what you’ve lost lifts a mirror
up to where you’re bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here’s the joyful face you’ve been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always fist or always stretched open, you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding.
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as bird wings.”
~~~

We cant be afraid to look, we need to be more afraid of what will happen if we DON’T look. What we are seeing now is the accumulation of not looking for far too long.

The grieving, or inability to grieve starts early. We are all born expecting a certain set of circumstances that aren’t there and those taking care of us just act like this weird mess is all completely normal, when its anything but.

We expected to have a tribe where we felt a strong sense of belonging and purpose, where we very much felt our lineage alive in us- stretched out back to the ancestors and forward to future generations. Where we were aware of our role in the whole. Where everyone around us held our same values, lived as we did.

We have lost so much.

Until we start grieving properly for our losses we will not stop eating the planet alive or killing one another or looking the other way as our fellow human and non human family suffer.

Here, maybe this poem by David Whyte will help get it going….

THE WELL OF GRIEF

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,

turning down through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe,

will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear,

nor find in the darkness glimmering,
the small round coins,
thrown by those who wished for something else.

~~~
So for me it seems appropriate that a civilization who’s civilians largely do not know how to grieve properly would become infected by a disease targeting the lungs, the organ associated with grief and sorrow according to ancient Chinese medicine. The lungs are meant to take in the fresh and new. The virus is making us breath deeper, harder, forcing us to take in more. In Chinese Medicine each organ has another organ it works in tandem with. For the lungs it is the large intestine. So it’s no surprise that about half of all people who get the virus have gastrointestinal problems. The large intestine is all about getting rid of waste, of what is no longer of use. We have been resisting doing that for so long, clinging to old systems that are not ultimately doing anyone or anything any good.
And many of the people dying of Coronavirus end up having kidney failure at the end. Again, in Traditional Chinese Medicine if grief issues are not sorted out in the lungs it can move to the kidneys. The Kidneys are associated with the emotion of fear. Improper grieving, excess grieving and repressed grieving can all lead to fear.

Listen, I believe we are all in a constant state of deep grieving, most of us just don’t know it. And some of us are much better at masking it than others. Look at the five stages of grief: Denial, Depression, Anger, Bargaining and Acceptance. Most us are in denial that the earth is dying by our hands, on our watch- because even if you say you “believe” in climate change this is not the same as fully understanding what this entails and really feeling this crisis. The fear over the corona virus is highlighting our collective denial about the Climate crisis. The Virus is such a MINISCULE threat compared to the ecological one but our denial over the climate crisis keeps us from responding to it in the same way we are responding to the virus.
And for many who do believe climate change is real often get stuck in the Bargaining phase where they think technology or The Green New Deal or Elon Musk will save us.
And look at Depression, the rates are rising all the time, its all just unprocessed grief. Depression isn’t sadness, it’s the inability to feel sad in a way that helps you heal and move on, it’s a kind of psycho-spiritual constipation.
And I’m sure you noticed how angry everyone is all the time. Trump obviously has anger issues but you can find numerous clips of Joe Biden over the last several months lashing out at voters confronting him or simply asking him a question. When I watch these clips all I see is unprocessed grief. He is a sad broken person who doesn’t know how to grieve in healthy ways, barely any of us do.
There are times I can get to the stage of Acceptance with my grief but I mostly vacillate between Anger and Depression.
But there are many many ways unacknowledged and unprocessed grief shows itself, not just in Depression and Anger and Bargaining. A fixation on hope and positivity that keeps one from seeing what actually is happening would be another way. Fear is another.
In healthy tradition cultures, when tragedy strikes they COME TOGETHER and grieve (usually with powerful effective rituals and ceremonies to facilitate it) and then they are able to make peace with it and move on. Not only are we not taught how to do this, have no real effective ceremonies or rituals or trained facilitators to help us, but we are living in a time where the tragedies are ONGOING and RELENTLESS. We are not wired to handle this much horrible devastating shitfuckery, we just aren’t and this needs to be addressed and studied more. We are not given proper time to grieve, to catch our breath. This virus is giving us that time, its literally physically making us stop and catch our breath.

I wonder if we subconsciously wanted this to happen. We didn’t know how to stop ourselves. We desperately wanted to have a “real” reason to stop. If you had tried to stop before all this and self isolate you were considered weird or lazy or aimless or crazy. Trust me, I know. I stopped over a year and a half ago and everyone was like
“Yes, but what do you DO???”
“Nothing”, I would say. “I’m doing nothing, I’m stopping until I know what to do. I am a Stoptivist now.”
It made people uncomfortable and confused.
No one really understood what I was doing but now many are being forced to do the same. I’ve always been ahead of my time, lol.

We are all just so tired. The virus is giving many of us the socially acceptable “excuse” needed to “do nothing”. We weren’t allowed or “ordered” to “do nothing” for the climate, for the wildlife holocaust, for future generations, but perhaps this shutdown will be the precursor to more and more STOPTIVISM. At least that is my greatest hope.

And part of why this virus happened is because we can’t stop destroying nature at an alarming rate. A football field of nature is lost every 30 seconds. Wild animals have fewer and fewer places to take refuge, so are coming into contact with humans more and more. This can lead to contracting viruses from them. And then we spread the virus because we can’t stop flying around the world like rock stars because we are not satisfied with where we are. I shouldn’t say “we” because only 5% of the human population will ever get on an airplane in their life. So some of us are responsible for much more damage than others, much much more.

~~~

BUT HONESTLY……

What I really think is going on, the real reason why I am so fucking hung up on what happened with this guy is that I’m using it as a distraction (just like humanity is using the coronavirus as a distraction) so I don’t have to think about the thing I’m truly worried about. This thing contains so much grief that I don’t actually know if my body can actually hold it without breaking.

If we don’t take this opportunity to change course then we are headed for some very deep consequences with unimaginable suffering and loss, that will make this virus look like a stubbed toe- its nothing compared to what is in store. If we just scramble to get everything back to “normal” after this virus we will pay dearly.

Normal is destroying the Earth, our one and only HOME, at an alarming rate.
Normal has created a merciless pyramid of human hierarchy resulting in severe poverty on one end and massive hoarding on the other.
Normal is wiping out 100 to 200 species everyday.

None of this should be seen as normal. All of this should be regarded as insanity, as derangement, as extreme psychopathic behavior, as the symptoms of an even more widespread and deadly virus. The Ojibwe called it Windigo, the Cree called it Wetiko, but it has many names. It’s a virus of the mind and soul that makes its host so hungry that greed takes over and a voracious feeding frenzy follows, but the host is never satiated, so eats until everything is destroyed, eventually eating its own self.

If we don’t take this time to reflect, to reassess, to re-prioritize, to weed out all that is unnecessary and harmful, I fear what comes next. No matter what we do we have already sent some of the Earth’s systems on a dysfunctional runaway trajectory, some of which is irreversible at this point, so hard times are coming no matter what we do.
But my God, are we going to face those times clinging to our demented version of “normal”, clinging to our familiar derangement and delusion and denial or are we going to strive to come back to our senses, to our humanity, to our hearts. What are we going to choose to serve? – these insane destructive violent systems we live by or are we going to choose to fully serve one another, choose to honor and respect the Earth and attempt to start healing her, choose to try and give back even a fraction of what we have taken from Her and our fellow humans?

And all this talk of “essential” workers, its driving me crazy! This time should show us precisely what is actually fucking essential and what isn’t, everything else is mere excess, everything else is just destroying and exploiting for
NO GOOD REASON.
NO GOOD REASON.
NO GOOD REASON.
The virus is somehow enough of a reason for us to switch over to essential work only, but the much bigger threat of EVERYTHING DYING is not enough of a reason?????
The fact that 8 million people are dying every year from air pollution is not enough of a reason?
The fact that 1000 children a day are dying from climate change is not enough of a reason?
The fact that ONE BILLION animals perished in the recent Australian forest fires is not enough of a reason?
The fact that the everglades and rainforests and coral reefs are all going by the wayside is not a good enough reason?
The fact that the life expectancy of a Native living on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota is only 48 years old is not a good enough reason?
The fact that black women die in childbirth 4 times the rate as white women do in this country is not a good enough reason?
This talk of how are we going to “restart society”….NO!!!! It’s a horrible horrible, unjust, ugly, apathetic, short sighted society we have! It’s not a society at all!….it’s a doomsday machine. Why would we want to restart a machine that runs on exploitation, slavery, human hierarchy, and enormous environmental degradation? Wha????
Most people seem happy to comply with the government mandates and suggestions to shelter in place and practice social distancing. But do you think the masses would go for orders to stop all unnecessary travel for the sake of the environment? HELL NO. Do you think people would go along with a ban on meat or energy use restrictions in order to, you know, make it so there is a chance today’s children don’t inherit a dead planet. HELL THE FUCK NO they wouldn’t. This is a problem. This is a collective pandemic psychosis.

What if we permanently switched to “essential work only”? What would that look like?
What do we actually need to be OK?
Food, shelter, clothes, healthcare, healthy relationships, play, exercise. That’s it really. How did things get so fucking complicated????
So we need people growing, harvesting, preserving and preparing food in ways that do as little harm to the Earth as possible.
We need health care providers and healers.
We need teachers to teach these things.
We need artists and storytellers and musicians.
We need people with handy skills, not so we can build more shit. We need to stop building. There are more than enough buildings now. I’ve read there are enough empty houses in the US that every homeless person could have 2 or 3.
Now it should be about just maintaining and retro-fitting existing buildings. No new buildings. The cement industry alone has such a high footprint that if it were a country it would be the 3rd largest emitter in the world. We need to be done with cement now. We need to just learn how to fucking MAKE DUE. Its time to go full on Maria Von Trapp making play clothes out of the old curtains mode.
We need to STOP the production of EVERYTHING that is not ESSENTIAL. Well, first we need to redefine what essential is! Most of the shit that is produced is not necessary and isn’t even making us happy anyways!…because it is all just a poor substitution for what we really want! We want realness, we want to feel useful, we want intimacy and connection, we want love, REAL LOVE.
We want to rest in someone’s arms (I was SO close to getting that!).

That’s it!
What more is there?
As Maya Angelou said “We need much less than we think we need.”

And we need to all fucking SHARE in carrying out this essential work, instead of just the poor doing it all. Enough with this extreme human hierarchy.

Can you see this world?
Why does it seem so implausible?
We are all so deprived of this simpler world- a world that the vast majority of our ancestors got to live in- that we have gone INSANE.
And in our insanity we stray more and more from what is essential and necessary and real.
Air travel is NOT necessary, its nothing but harmful. Its what spread the freakin’ virus!…and this is an industry that is being bailed out?????
Who is there to bail out those who live on Pine Ridge Reservation?
Or those in Flint, Michigan, who STILL don’t have clean drinking water.
Or those living in the Niger Delta in Africa where a third of our oil comes from, where toxic oil spills and conflict have lowered their life expectancy to 40 years of age.
Who is going to bail out the one million animal species threatened with extinction sometime this century?
Certainly not this government!
It has to be us!
But only if we are shaken out of this nightmare life.
The coronavirus is a wake-up call but I fear we will once again hit the snooze button.

So I guess its easier for me right now to grieve for the loss of this (barely) relationship with this guy than to think about the grief that will come if we let this opportunity, this impetus for change, pass by. Just as it is easier for us to focus on the Coronavirus than the ecological meltdown underway because we feel like we have some measure of control over it and we know it will end at some point. Whereas the ecological crisis seems so daunting, seems so out of our control, and there is no end in sight to it.

We must learn from this rare moment.

BUT HOW??? Do we have what it takes???…..

…..Well, I am not holding my breath….because I literally can’t because I have the Coronavirus and my breathing is constricted, lol.

But if we don’t learn and change from this we are choosing even more suffering.

Just like if I choose to just grovel and feel sorry for myself over this guy and feed into the idea that there is something wrong with me, instead of trying to see what I can learn from this experience in order to help me grow.
Nothing is wrong with me (well….not as much as I’m telling myself there is anyways). But I must realize that I’m not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. I am intense, I can be a bit of a Debbie Downer if you haven’t noticed, and I am apparently a drifter now- these aren’t exactly traits people look for in a potential mate.
But I might have to come to terms with the fact that being on the path I’m on is lonely and may not involve a partner, or if it does it could be quite fleeting.
But hopefully it lasts a tad bit longer than this last guy did! JESUS!

I’m now re-calling Elizabeth Gilbert’s definition of a soul mate.

“People think a soul mate is your perfect fit, and that’s what everyone wants. But a true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.

A true soul mate is probably the most important person you’ll ever meet, because they tear down your walls and smack you awake. But to live with a soul mate forever? Nah. Too painful. Soul mates, they come into your life just to reveal another layer of yourself to you, and then leave.

A soul mates purpose is to shake you up, tear apart your ego a little bit, show you your obstacles and addictions, break your heart open so new light can get in, make you so desperate and out of control that you have to transform your life, then introduce you to your spiritual master…”

Well, this guy has certainly come into my life and shaken me to my core. Those eyes of his were definitely a mirror. Almost too hard to look into.

Maybe it’s like the fox I saw the other day. A sudden red flash of wild furriness as she ran past, then a brief pause to look back at me and hold up the mirror so as to remind me what its all about, remind me what I have failed to do and what I must do, and then with a swift graceful easiness she darted up the hill and was gone. No wait, please, stay just a little longer I called out.

But no, another soul mate, come and gone.

But shit, couldn’t we have made out a little before they left??? (not the fox, the guy).
I mean c’mon, Mama needs her biscuits! (ha ha, that quote is for all you hardcore ‘The New Girl’ fans out there).

I’ve been rejected before by men. But this feels different, this hurts in a new way. I think its because I’m older now and I’m not letting my ego run the show (at least I hope so). So its me that’s feeling this loss, not the “how dare he!” pride of my ego. It was me who wanted him, not my ego.

The timing and synchronicity of how this very short lived relationship came about seemed so magical and powerful. I really for the most part had resigned years ago to accepting that finding and having a partner just wasn’t in the stars for me. But right before I met this guy I decided that maybe I just needed to be more “pro-active” in finding someone if that’s what I really want. So I did the thing all the self help relationship books and love gurus tell you to do. I made a list of all the things I wanted in a partner. And then literally like a week later I met this guy and he fucking checked off every single fucking quality on my list, to a fucking tee. I mean some of these things were very specific. And I was like DAMN, this manifestation thing is for real! This. Shit. Works! Is it that easy???? Surely there must be a catch? This seems too good to be true.

And of course it fucking was too good to be true because everybody is a mess and no one knows what the fuck they really want or need because this culture keeps us from truly knowing ourselves or even keeps us from becoming who we were meant to be outside of these bullshit modern industrial systems.
Until these dysfunctional, make believe, oppressive, crazy making, artificial systems we live under either collapse or are dismantled (which let’s face it we don’t have the tools needed to do that, too many of us see these systems as keeping us alive, too many of us love these systems, too many of us have Stockholm Syndrome) then very few of us are going to really get what we truly need and desire.

All that he wrote to me that he said he wanted, things I wanted too. Is he getting those things with her? I mean part of me truly hopes so, someone should be getting what they fucking want for fucksake!

I’ve been wishing that memory erasing technology existed from that film ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ where you can just have people removed from your memory. Because my imagination is just running wild and can’t stop coming up with reasons as to why I wasn’t chosen.
The first one: the person he did choose is probably younger and hotter than me because TESTOSTERONE and cultural conditioning.
Another possible reason is that she probably just reminds him of his mom more than I do. I’ve heard that men often subconsciously end up with partners that remind them of their mother in some way. The third most searched for word that straight men use when looking for porn online is “mom” or “mother”. I even know some men that are self aware enough that they realize this is what they are in fact doing with their choice in partner. Let’s face it, I’m not going to remind ANY guy of their mom. I am not really like anyone’s mom, lol.
But of course this is all just speculation, just my brain trying to make some sense out of this confusing painful thing.

But just because it didn’t “work out” doesn’t mean it was a failure exactly. That was a big deal for me to find someone I had a real connection with and who I also wanted to “shelter on place with” all night long if you catch my drift. So I guess it doesn’t matter if it lasted 2 weeks or 20 years (I was going to say 40 years but I think the planet will be a complete fireball by then). Because either way it ends. “Everything ends” could be one take away. I can work on being grateful for what I did have, even if it was cut short.
Ridiculously, cruelly short.
I really thought I was incapable of feeling such deep and soaring things for another person, so this experience has shown me I am not broken after all. I was just locked up. He was the key that unlocked me. And now instead of focusing on the key- the tall, good looking, smart, funny key with wistful blue eyes that penetrated my very soul- I need to just be glad I am no longer closed for business.

~~~

So multiple times a day I step out the door and sit by the Kokosing River, an Algonquin word meaning “River of Little Owls”. She joins with the Mohican River and together they form the Walhonding River which joins with the Tuscarawas River to form the Muskingum River which flows into the Ohio River at Marietta. The Ohio River is a Seneca word for “Beautiful” but ironically it is tragically the most polluted river in the country. It seems so many rivers got to keep their Native names but most of the towns and cities along them that pollute their waters have Western names. And dams, which hurt rivers maybe the most, are always named after white guys, usually dead white guys.

But I can’t bring myself to cry as I sit beside the Kokosing. I don’t feel I have the right to pour my troubles into her along with all the rest of humanity’s bullshit she has to contend with- the chemical farm run off, the trash, invasive species, etc.
So instead I cry on the floor of the cottage, which is made from “re-claimed” hardwood from old barns. Using such wood is the latest trend in shabby chic décor. I hate that it’s referred to as “re-claimed”, its such colonizer language….
“I hereby re-claim this wood in the name of HGTV!”
The first time this wood in the floor was “claimed” was by colonists to build their structures of occupation, cutting down the biggest oldest trees they could find. I’ve read that it will be very tricky to re-build parts of Notre Dame because it was built with such massive trees from old established forests, and now those kinds of trees, once abundant, are extremely scarce.
The only way for this floorwood to truly be re-claimed is if it were allowed to return to its rightful place on the forest floor where it would be able to decompose back into its Mother, to help feed new life. But now it is frozen in time, layers of varnish encasing it, like a ghost wearing a sheet.

We are all short of breath. None of us are fully breathing in life. The ways we have been conducting ourselves cannot be called living, or even dying. For in true dying new life arises out of it.
No, we are ghosts, this is a tortured purgatory ghost world that we’ve created. We are living as Bruce Willis in ‘The 6th Sense’ not realizing we are dead. This culture is like a chicken with its head cut off, somehow able to still mindlessly run around and around and around.

So I cry on a floor made of ghosts, for our ghost lives, in a ghost world that may never get to pass on into the light from this haunted darkness.
This virus is unveiling the mouth of a tunnel to us. It’s saying “See that light at the end? Go towards the light, all are welcome.”

Will we go? Or will we be distracted once again by the flashy hypnotic artificial glow of civilization, fooled like moths drawn to a lightbulb, thinking it’s the moon when it is just a ghost lit by the black sooty souls of ancient sunbeams violently ripped from their resting place deep within a mountain and put on trucks and trains like bodies to the death camps, where they will be forced to power our hollow, grave-digging ghost culture.

I want so badly for this to be a period of self-reflection for everyone so we don’t go back to our old ways. After this virus is over I hope we choose to continue to “shelter in place” for the Earth, for the animals, for the rivers, for the forests, for the 8 million who die every year from air pollution, for the 50 square meters of arctic sea ice that the average American is responsible for melting each year with their individual emissions.

But I’m afraid we won’t do this.
And I’m afraid I won’t be able to breathe if that happens.

There are so many possibilities within this time.
This grand pause is a pregnant one.
Will we miscarriage?
Will we choose to abort?

My chance meeting with that guy felt ripe with possibilities…but it didn’t take.

Not much that is healthy and real is going to take if we can’t start living beyond these horrible, mad, man made systems we inherited from the most broken people who have ever lived.

We MUST ask ourselves

HOW CAN WE CREATE AND NURTURE THE CONDITIONS FOR THIS NEW WORLD TO TAKE?

Time grows short. As China gets over the worse of the virus the air pollution is already coming back.

Can’t we listen to Brittney Spears for once and engage in a massive worldwide strike????

~~~

So I made this sign to help me not obsess as much over this guy situation.
So far the sign is working…I think. I mean I don’t feel better yet but at least I’m not doing things that would make it worse.

I hope after this pandemic is over I can make this sign for everyone:

****************************
GOOD JOB
Not….going back to those insane unjust exploitative economic systems.
Not….going back to all that non essential busy work distracting us from what really matters.
Not….going back to propping up a society based on competition, slavery, and the plundering and destruction of the natural world.
Not….keeping the ventilators hooked up to such a sick toxic destructive artificial culture but letting it die out.

GOOD JOB….

Learning to breathe on your own.

****************************

The bright side is that now I am immune to the virus, so I am free to touch my face as much as I please. Jealous? Maybe I’ll even start a dating app for those who have had the virus, I can call it ‘OK COVID’.
“Would you consider not staying 6 feet away from me sometime?”
“Hey baby, would you like to shelter in my pants?”
“Looking at you sure doesn’t flatten my curve.”
“I wish I could say my mind is as clean as my hands.”

OK OK, sorry, that’s enough of that.”