The Myth of Immortality
For the most part, I don’t think most of us know we’re going to die.
And for the most part, I don’t think we know that we’re truly, deeply, intrinsically connected, either.
I found out I was going to die when I was 34 because I was diagnosed with a cancer that had persisted for over a decade. Finding out that I’m going to die is one of the greatest gifts this life has given me. I came alive.
I cannot help but look at the forced separation that is this quarantine the same way. Perhaps in the threat of death, we will find out we are alive now—vitally, crucially alive. Perhaps also we will begin to recognize how deeply connected we are, because once we were forced away from one another, wonderful things we built began to crumble. Awful things we built came up for judgement. And terror we wrought on the earth has begun to dissipate. In China and India, city skies are clear. In LA the insects are loud, and in New York a rainbow was seen in the thunder at 7pm when everybody cheered for the healthcare workers.
It’s one thing for us as individuals to face mortality or isolation alone. For me to go through surgeries and testing, for three of my closest friends to confront losing their fathers in the last few weeks. It is quite another for 210 nations around the world to be thrown into the paradox of vulnerability both of our own making and utterly not—at once, together. We didn’t create this zombie-like virus, but we didn’t respect it either. As a humanity. One humanity.
I read about the virus this weekend. The science of the virus. It’s not alive. It only really comes “alive”—can multiply itself—when it lands on us. We are its hosts. Bats, a tiger, and us. Zombies have been everywhere in culture recently. The Walking Dead, movies, even Minecraft. There has been plenty of conjecture about why… not least of which I recognize as the fact that we look more and more like the overweight screen-addicts in Wall-E. Disconnected from one another, half alive in a narcoleptic state of constant entertainment yet no life experience.
I was really just a child when I began reading Native literature. Maybe 12 years old. Life in the old ways sounded wonderful to me. I’m sure I romanticized it because we know life was hard. Disease, weather, Trails of Tears, food shortages, small pox blankets, injury and infection—we know life was hard. But it was also real. In my imagination, it had meaning. Living in life. Life all around you. The hum of the earth everywhere. No separation between you and your people and nature. Everything was living. The earth you walked on, the sky above, the trees between you and the animals that wandered. And life speaks with life. Life exchanges with life.
Life is always balanced on the edge of a blade. When we know it, when we are awake, I think we live richer more truthful lives. And that’s what I wanted. A meaningful life. Full of wild truths that kept me awake to everything life can be, including death, including transformation.
Nature did this, too. Nature made the coronavirus. I don’t believe in punishment, but I do believe in the cypher that is life. What we put out into the world will return to us. The earth will turn. What moves in the current will return to its home shores. Nature, life itself, will achieve its balance because it is only in balance that life itself can continue. Tonight onNPR, a virologist who studies bats said we have simply encroached too far into the wild, the places where bats live, and so now we get to share their viruses as we do their homelands.
In the Zen way, I also try not to call anything “good” or “bad.” Nature is neither good nor bad; nature is about life—persisting in life. In my own life, I believe that blessings come to me when I am living in alignment with nature because in alignment I can receive the gifts nature offers. In alignment, I wait until the apples are ready to harvest, and as the days get colder, I cook those that may go bad into cider and butters, or dig into the clay earth and preserve them in the cold until we need them.
At the height of the clouds, I look down on us and wonder if the virus is the manifestation of some message in a bottle we threw into the ocean come back to us. Did nature bring it back, is she reflecting back to us what we have become, holding up a mirror? We loved our devices, now they are all we have. We loved our cars, now we cannot drive them anywhere. We loved being entertained, but did we reach for enough meaning? We loved our burgers, now they bring our viruses? We loved our egos, the notion that we’re all so independent, that we alone—fill in the blank; now isolated, we crave one another and recognize how vital the morning chat with our bodega clerk was to our existence.
If we live in alignment with nature now, is the gift this reflection? This concentrated moment when we see all we have made, and all we have not. “Humans, you must share; humans, give the bats their space—they eat your insects and pollinate your farms.” All we control, and everything out of our control. Is the blessing in this moment saving ourselves from the poison tree? From disconnection, from isolation, from the myth of independence, from the myth of immortality, the myth that what we do doesn’t matter, the myth that we are not connected—to everything?
I cannot help but ask, finally… if we’re not living in connection, are we alive?
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