The Great Slow Down

This is what all this is, isn’t it? A great, collective, individual – soul searching slow down. In a world confronted by it’s own inability to control or predict, a world where everyone is impacted by this threat, a world where we are forced to take a step back, quite literally and distance ourselves from the life that we had come to know as “normal” – it is in this space we are given a beautiful gift. The great slow down is asking – now more than ever – what matters most to you? What is true and beautiful for you? What feels good and gives you joy? How do you want to spend your precious and perfect time that we are granted in this wild, vulnerable and sacred form?

This great slow down is quite literally changing the vibration of our planet. We are finally able to hear the earth a little better without the noise of our so called “normal”. There are reductions in pollution and emissions that are allowing people to see mountains for the first time in 30 years, longer than I have been alive. With the great slow down, people are doing beautiful and important things all over the world. And I’m left wondering about what type of “normal” I want to have in my life after all this is over.

I had a dream the night before last that my body was racked with grief. I cried no tears but my body shook as if releasing a well of sadness. I could not stop the involuntary response from deep within. So the next morning when tears began to run down my face, and my body began to shake, from the sadness – from the love – from the perfection of it all, I didn’t stop it, instead I said “you are beautiful”.  And the tears they kept coming, and my body shook. And in the rawness of being human and connected to billions of other souls who are in this together was pureness and perfection and everything I needed to know about being alive.

So as I decide to let go and say goodbye to parts of my old ”normal”, there is sadness. I end chapters I thought weren’t finished yet. I let go of this idea of what a “normal” life needs to look like and surrender to the pursuit of my hearts calling. I acknowledge serving the world will look different than it has. I honor the crumbling traditional structures and say a prayer for the future we are creating together. A world that can be infinitely better and more beautiful and just than what we tolerated before. We don’t need tolerance. We need radical love and remembering.

The great slow down is the gift to look inside. To reflect. To remember. What was that dream you dreamed in the world you wished to create? The world needs our light. The gift that is us. In a time where we so clearly belong to each other and to this planet, what matters most? Isn’t it the people? Isn’t it love? Isn’t it precious moments like arms holding us tight and being together? We are not separate. This great slow down is showing us that now more than ever. Interconnected. Intertwined. All of life and all of existence. We can no longer breathe without recognizing the impact of our breath on another. Only we get to decide. What will be our new “normal”? What deserves to have a place in our life when this is over? How do we want to spend the rest of our time in this sacred, vulnerable, precious form on this sacred, vulnerable and precious planet?

I pray that so much of what we called “normal” be sent out to sea

I pray that we remember the small kindnesses that helped us through these weeks

I pray we remember to appreciate whatever that thing was that sustained us, whether it was love or faith or a person

May we always remember the gift of being alive at this divine moment in time, here to teach each other and heal each other and become the best that we were meant to be.