Rambling Thoughts on Covid, Collective Care & Change

As I'm sure is true for many of you, the past several weeks have been accompanied by myriad reactions, emotions, and states of being in my own life and the lives of many people close to me.


There are days during which the ability to work from my little home and small pleasures like the ability to go for a walk, cook, and nap at any time of day feels like a most welcome gift. I've experienced important learning and growth as I've tried to lean into (with fits and starts) this invitation to live out a new story that this weird Covid-19 presents: that I am not what I do.


There are other days when anxiety creeps in: about my little family's own financial sustainability and emotional wherewith-all. About people I know and love getting sick or dying, and about their loved ones. About health care workers and all the essential workers on the front lines who by their own sacrificial spirit or financial necessity (or a combination of both) show up every day to literally keep us going. About the ongoingness of all of this; the way the days and weeks feel like they're drudging on.


It hurts my heart and makes me angry that so many privileges are bound up in my ability to do things like work from home, nap and cook; that we live in society that privileges the few (usually the white, straight, cisgender, wealthy, able-bodied, and those granted US citizenship) over and at the expense of the few (who aren't so few).

Even as we take note of remarkable and creative acts of courage, care-giving and charity during this time, the structural realities of our world reveal to us starkly that we are not set up to take care of our people on a day-to-day basis-- much less so when times are hard. As we've seen in disaster after disaster, it is the poor and the vulnerable who are made to bear the brunt of the crisis.
To me, the most tangible reason things remain this way is because we allow them to. We get comfortable with the status quo, with injustice, with scapegoating.

In times of great challenge in our history, it has taken not only tremendous and important small-scale acts of service and charity to get us through, but a commitment to large-scale change and systems-- from civil society, faith communities, and government.


On the days when I'm able to take a long view, to ground myself in some sense of collective perspective, I feel a pulse of opportunity beneath the surface. As we have many times before when crisis hits, we are given once again an opportunity to remember our interconnectedness. To consider the welfare and well-being of the collective over individual gain. To make sacrifice not just an ideal of individual heroes, but a palpable part of all of our communities. I hope and pray that we do.


As the wise Master Frodo says in Return of the King, we know there's no going back again. This experienced has changed and exposed too much for us to go about business as usual.

If we want to create and sustain communities and ecosystems that create real opportunity for collective flourishing, we must take important risks.