Both Nick Cave and Stephen Jenkinson, likely others too, have spoken about a missed opportunity with the lockdowns and the Covid moment. An opportunity to really see, to really be with and to really talk about our global situation. This could have offered us up a nuanced dance to come back into the symphony of Humanity with.
I noticed early on that, while we called it a respiratory illness, Covid-19 seemed most intensely to affect our communication capacities. I saw it as a debilitated ability to hear and speak. But listening to Nick Cave speak, in his book Hope, Faith and Carnage (well worth a listen or read) with Sean O'Hanagan, I got a different sense.
In the Bible, my favourite story is of the Tower of Babel. The loosing of a furious curse from a threatened being (not my idea of God but is said to be as much in the story) who tore asunder the shared tongue of the Earth and her children. All beings could communicate and it was Humans who proffered the construction of a tower to the Heavens so that we could fast track our ascension to the divine realm. Well the antagonist of the story (I'm surely upsetting a few people with my version of events here) imposed on the beings of the Earth, 'Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they cannot speak as one.'
This is what I am calling the Curse of Babel. And the Curse of Babel, during the Covid moment, lifted. We all shared a common tongue again. It was a common tongue of loss and grief and broken convention. It was an invitation from the Virus, not considered to be generous among species by the Humans, to speak once more a common Earth bound tongue.
But with so few of us reading the waves and wind and waters to see it coming, when it did it overwhelmed us and scared us. Most of us spent the time with this new tongue asking, 'When will it all go back to normal?'
And it has gone back to normal. We missed it. We missed the opportunity to announce our misgivings about the whole global Human project and ask, with the appropriate amount of red-faced humility, 'Mother Earth and Father Sky and all our siblings, what are we to do?'
So we find ourselves in the Maelstrom of politics, culture, location and meaning, with fresh coats of painted confidence and shiny new plastic lives, with a hangover that feels worse than any hangover we've had before but still jacked up on the adrenaline of it all most can't feel their bodies yet. And we know something that we usually don't know in the dawn following our worlds shaking apart and shaking back together; we know the size and shape of our absentee purpose.
It's the size of the Earth and the shape of a village.
Forgive us Lord, for we know not what we do...
Ryan Dickinson