I start this blog off with the following. If you have been reading along, you know that each month I share my personal journey while leaning against my metaphorical Lighthouse. As we all are too painfully aware, our lives changed drastically about three and a half weeks ago when we were asked to “shelter in place with exceptions”. This action of distancing ourselves from our loved ones, our neighbors and our fellow citizens would help mitigate the Covid-19 virus that unfortunately was already in our country.
So, following that advice I could not in good faith, even metaphorically, travel to my Lighthouse. For the duration I have along with my best friend my love, who is also hunkered down with me, renamed our home The Foxhole.
The following is my first monthly post from the Foxhole. In my journal written daily privately and some on social media, I have adopted the image of the foxhole in my “Sheltering in Place with Exceptions” notes. As I left off last month I was going to attempt to share how I am using meditation to shed my judgemental thoughts with the goal of allowing my intuition to grow and flourish. Well if any of you have read my almost daily posts about what is going on in our world today, you know that goal of my intuition flourishing has been a miserable failure. I have to rein in my judgemental nature. I JUST HAVE TO!
OK, back to some reason. I constantly aim to share my love of literature and reading. I am trying to weave that love of literature in my reflections of my personal growth. This month while sidetracked with the world wide crisis that has come to our neighborhood, my reflections turned to the obvious. Life imitates art and sometimes art imitates life.
So I looked for some obvious clues. One clue, I found is the conclusion that many illnesses, viruses, and other plagues have been started by animals, insects, birds, rats etc.. That common thread led me to George Orwell’s great post WWII story (novella?) Animal Farm. Now set aside the obvious political elements of the beginning of the Cold War running through his story and just read Mr. Orwell’s creative human dialogue of one of his animal characters.
Major the self proclaimed leader of the farm. (And why not, we all know pigs are the smartest of them all…well maybe the ravens are up there on the smart scale too!)
Major sums up his speech about what the problem is facing all animals- Man!
Major continues, Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is to weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
Major is eloquent as he continues, Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? Only get rid of man and the produce of our labour would be are own.
Hmm, get rid of man. Art imitating life. Was Orwell’s Animal Farm prescient? Not at all. We have a history of not dealing well with plagues, as we all know, in a forever! Art imitating life is in so many wonderful pieces of literature and stories. Two that come to mind, King’s Stand and Albert Camus’s The Plague. That was written post war as was the Animal Farm. Many have opined that it was an allegory of the French Resistance standing against the Nazi’s advance through their country. Maybe, but on the face of it, his writing shows the power of his plague the same power we see today. Royalty, country’s leaders, movie stars, the rich, poor, the homeless and most tragically our nurses, doctors and all the 1st responders, are at risk of falling before this virus.
So this month I end with a piece of advice that was written by Eugene Fersen almost one hundred years ago in 1923. I paraphrase, “To live our life to the fullest, what does that mean? It means to do always one’s duty at the right time!”
Our duty right now is to work very hard to shelter in place, now. That is our duty and by doing our duty we may all live our lives to the fullest.
Thank you for reading and stay safe!
Mark