The World is Changing
The world is changing. Layers are torn away, what lies beneath is exposed. We are living in that moment.
Except it isn’t a moment. It’s time, and time is not a line. This is not a hash in the arrow. This is everything. This is all time. Right now.
A pandemic is spreading, and we are responding. Faster in some places, slowly in others. People are in their homes, reading, cooking, talking on the phone again… for the first time… in a decade? People are bringing home cats and dogs, and storing dried beans and rice. We are preparing.
Some lost their jobs. Quickly. Within days we went from business as usual, taking our kids to school, and trains to work—to working from sofas, schools closing, and bars and restaurants shuttered. People are losing their jobs, or wondering when they will.
And underneath that surface, the markets fall, the poor get poorer. Homeless children may or may not eat, and we are swept out of parks. Suddenly the city requires paid sick leave. Suddenly, it is not legal to kick people out of their apartments. Suddenly, the system is required to serve all of the ill—whether they have insurance or not. Suddenly we are asked not to gather, and not to touch each other.
And us, alone in our homes, the ability to leave them to be with others taken away—suddenly we realize we miss each other desperately. Instagram and Facebook and Twitter were fine with us, until they became the only ways to “be together.”
Suddenly, we find out we need each other. Suddenly, we miss even the smallest brushes of a hand with colleagues and friends. Suddenly, we experience what it means to be deeply, inextricably interconnected, and to deeply, significantly need to be connected. Suddenly, we feel both deeply connected, and painfully disconnected.
This is the moment. This is the moment of wakefulness to the eternity that is our existence, asking us what we want our world to be. What matters when the present moment is our eternity? When it beholds our deepest selves, and our mundane allowances.
Did we plant a poison tree all those years ago? All those years ago, when we made machines and slaves so that we could make money; when we separated God from the Earth so that we could separate man from woman; when we stole children so we could steal land; when we stopped knowing that Earth is alive. That we are alive.
If we did plant a poison tree, we can plant a medicine tree. The poison tree is coming down. Lightning has struck, and the flames are consuming it. Fire is burning. We are watching it change our world. And when the tree is done burning, and the ashes lay a black scar on our Earth, something new will want to grow. The Earth will be ready to birth it. Earth is only cycles of life and death. Life and death are only cycles of time. The world is changing. And we can change the world.
When the ash is before us, what will we plant? Will we choose the medicine tree?
The medicine tree is a world founded on life, aligned with the cycles of life, both celebrating them and bowing to them. We are all connected. And so all care for all. We take only what we need, and we give what we do not to those who do. We respect nature’s cycles, and we honor them. We let the rivers and wolves run. We watch the deer birth and die. We plant organically, and we love organically. We watch children become who they are made to be and help them find their places in the world. We let love flourish, between human beings with the will to love. We acknowledge our human vulnerabilities and provide for ourselves what is needed to manage them. We acknowledge our Earth’s vulnerabilities and we provide for them, as well.
The Medicine Tree is love, because life needs love.
Mitakuye Oyasin,
Mariah