The Boiling Point

The kettle is whistling. The water is roiling. Why now? What takes a simmer to a boil?

On Tuesday, muted in solidarity, I called my friend Anasa. She bears no responsibility to answer my queries or hold my shaking hand. Yet she gives me two full hours of her self; her story, her wisdom, her grace. As I listen it becomes evident that, despite studying race relations in college, my true understanding of the African-American experience is a speck on a pinhead. 

This is what sinks in when you take one day to shut the hell up and listen: 

The fire under this kettle was lit as soon as The White Lion dropped anchor. The heat has been relentless for Black Americans ever since, but over the last three months, the burner has flamed higher under the entire country. The murder of George Floyd, the final 212th degree.

The Coronavirus was the first layer of tinder, revealing the stark inequality and the fragility of the safety net for African-Americans.

Black Americans are 2.5 times more likely to die from the pandemic than White Americans. In Illinois, African-Americans make up 15% of the population and 42% of the deaths. In Chicago, 30% of the population and 72% of the deaths. Those statistics hold true everywhere. Why? 

African-Americans predominantly live in poor and dense urban areas, which makes social distancing impossible. They often suffer from pre-existing conditions, making them susceptible to serious reactions to the virus. This co-morbidity has its roots in the inaccessibility of nutritious food and quality health care. The jobs available to African-Americans do not frequently offer health insurance but, ironically, often pay too much to qualify for Medicaid. The kettle simmers.

Dire health outcomes were compounded by the fact that many Black Americans do not have a reserve of savings to buffer sudden unemployment. In March, unemployment for Black Americans was 6.7%. Now, it is 16.8%, stressing households already on the brink. The token relief of federal funding was not equitably distributed to black businesses, as PPP funding went primarily to businesses with established banker relationships. Despite Friday’s surprisingly positive job report, black unemployment ticked upwards. Often last hired and first fired, less than half of black adults now have a job. The water bubbles.

And then, on Monday, May 25, the world witnessed the brutal murder of George Floyd. Just one more in a seemingly endless litany of brutalities against African Americans — but this time, steam jets out the spout.

The wicked triptych of the pandemic with its disproportionate impact, persistent economic disadvantage intensified by unemployment and a chronic militarism brought into stark relief in Minneapolis opened the floodgates. And folks poured out to the streets.

Protests set against the backdrop of COVID-19, still stealing a thousand American lives daily, presents an agonizing choice: What takes primacy: righteous passive resistance or public health? This pathogen will surely spread through the spraying passion of those of us gathered tightly on city streets. The willingness to protest, despite the virus, reflects the depth of public rage. 

But, of course, many Black Americans were never working remotely. They are disproportionally the bus and subway drivers, sanitation workers and meatpackers, grocery and convenience store clerks, nurses and delivery people. Not only do Black Americans bear the brunt of the epidemic of police brutality, they are also the most exposed to the viral pandemic because they are, and always have been, among America’s essential workers.

In the last 13 days, we have collectively spiraled through myriad emotions; Anger, frustration, despair, uncertainty.  But in this emotional murk, a ray of hope shimmers, spurring us forward. 

This passion is being channeled into a level of civic engagement unseen in half a century. Thousands have joined in increasingly peaceful and patriotic protest. A significant number of white people are pausing to take moral inventory and examine their responsibility and accountability for the racism endemic to our country. The pandemic, which forced many to look inwards in a reassessment of priorities, has kindled a mass expression of renewed moral clarity. 

This broad coalition has inspired global demonstrations of solidarity, reminding us of what made America great in the first place. When we are at our best, we inspire the world. 

In this tumult, we ask, “What now? What can we draw from the past?”

A humble prayer:

If you are protesting, you are the face of the movement. If you do not assail, the movement becomes morally unassailable.

If you wear blue, take a knee, don’t brandish one. Wield tears, not tear gas. Trust is built in vulnerability.

If you are white, now is a time to learn, grow, donate and serve. Meditate in the discomfort of sitting outside the circle. Be humble in solidarity, but never silent in complicity. Leverage your privilege and platforms in support of justice beyond performative allyship.

This will be a battle both of and for hearts and minds. It will be dramatic and dull, rebellious and systemic. The broadcasting of continued police brutality and political venality that equally horrifies and inspires us, rests upon the structural and banal: The denied loan, rebuffed application, redlined district, passed-over promotion and rejected offer. It is rooted in a privatized prison system that incarcerates 20% of black men, two-thirds of whom have not been convicted of any crime but cannot afford bail.

The challenge must be met with inspired oratory, peaceful protest, activist art and civil disobedience: actions that shine a light on injustice and demand attention. But this effort will fall short, as President Obama recently wrote, if there is not systemic, legislative and institutional change both at the federal and the local level, where most police and criminal justice reform takes place. Let many march in the streets in June so that we ALL march to the polls in November. (Read Stacy Abrams’ Op-Ed on why voting is so important.)

When leadership is as deaf as justice is blind, when it bunkers away only to emerge viciously as a false prophet, then who raises her hand to lead?

Are you ready?

Are you willing not just to answer the call, but also answer the calls? Right the wrongs and write the laws? Pray with your heart and with your feet?

It will take a village to build a global one. Pastors and web designers, community organizers and speech writers, meditation teachers and loan officers, secretaries and bail bondsmen, lawyers and civil servants, health care workers and a vice president. 

If you want in, there’s a role for you, however you can authentically show up. 

The water is boiling. The kettle is screaming. 

Will it evaporate? Will it just condensate? Or worse, will it burn? 

Or will this steam, which when harnessed powers the locomotive and riverboat, propel us towards justice?

There is work to do. Finally, it feels like it is up to us.  

Let’s be here for each other.

8 Minutes, 46 Seconds

It’s late Saturday night. There’s a curfew in place here in Los Angeles. Hours ago, police discharged rubber bullets and pepper spray at protestors on Fairfax, less than 2 miles from here. I feel a mix of fury, confusion, guilt, powerlessness and a rare uncertainty about what to do. I sense I am not alone.

In college, I concentrated in race relations. I remember studying Robert F. Kennedy’s extemporaneous eulogy for Martin Luther King as he consoled a bereaved crowd in Indianapolis on the evening of his assassination. It moved me to tears. He invoked Aeschylus:

“And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom, by the awful grace of God.”

Over half a century later, we still await the wisdom that is the promise of this pain. Again, in unbearable heartache, we are left to wonder just how long is the arc of the moral universe. 

We have all seen it now. 8 minutes and 46 seconds of knee on neck. Rodney King haunts this moment. The embers from the fires in South Central have smoldered in our country over the past quarter century, fed by the rare videos that expose the epidemic of police brutality against African Americans.

While deeply retraumatizing, the widespread sharing of footage on social media has sparked public outrage, launched civic protest, and led to legal action. But it has not increased accountability in most police departments or slowed these savage slayings. 

Walter Scott. Eric Harris, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner. Freddie Gray, Michael Brown. Philando Castile. Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd and scores more.

As fires burn in Minneapolis, we ask what fire burns in the hearts of men that stokes such anger as to take another’s life? What heavy smoke clouds a man’s moral judgment to deny another’s breath: breath that is our birthright, repeated 23,000 times a day without thought, and taken away, in a brutal moment, without thought? 

Man is not born with this rage. It is learned. And the slaughter of innocent African-Americans will not end until we engage in a deep personal and societal moral inventory that isn’t resolved simply by bringing assailants to justice but by addressing the roots of this societal rage. What are the cultural conditions that lead white men to brutalize black men? It may be the most complicated historical question Americans will ever confront.

Swinging between outrage and numbness, we are left wondering what to do.

Words. Do they matter? Of course, they do. King reminds us, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Speak out, we must. But, before we do, find the silence that Derek Chauvin could not, for that is God’s only voice. Let our words articulate a clarity and moral authority that reflects this quietness, as if our prayer cushion lay across the bare floor of a Birmingham jail.

As a white person, I am seeking to find my appropriate place in this wickedness. If you are white, be humble and listen. But do not be inhibited in your humility lest your silence be complicit in this injustice. For just as a man can transcend self regardless of his religion, so can a man find truth irrespective of his skin color.

But what to do when words feel so inadequate? When they cannot extinguish the agony and frustration that flares in our hearts. 

Take to the street and pray with our feet?

Our social contract demands that we relinquish certain rights such that we receive greater rights and protections. But when society is in breach, when a people are not in receipt of those protections, is not civil disobedience justifiable?

We are left with the same tough questions etched by Langston Hughes in 1951:

“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore - And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over - like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?”

Right now, it feels explosive. Right now, the Dream feels so far away. The real dream is, of course, that the Dream is no longer a dream.

We must do all we can, every one of us, to instantiate a reality that extends all the protections and opportunities guaranteed in our mutual national contract to everyone. This must start with ourselves, but also extend into every nook of humanity.

What can you do? 

Honestly examine your implicit biases and change them. Read and educate yourself (check out the resource list below). See your personal wellness as inextricably tied with the well-being of society.

Yes, text Mayor Jacob Frey. Hold your lawmakers accountable. Foster and energize your community. Stand up, march, speak out. Talk to your kids, and your parents, and your neighbors. Listen a lot. Become an activist in the way that is authentic to you – whether that is quiet and empathic or loud and bold.

The world is not something happening to you. You are an active participant in the human condition.

Commune is offering 3 free social impact courses for everyone who is interested. Just email me at jeffk@onecommune.com and we will set up access:

Unwinding Prejudice with Evelyn Carter

Redefining Leadership with Off The Mat, Into The World

Organize a March with Emi Guereca

Maya Angelou wrote, “History, despite its wrenching pain cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” May we both pray and work for the dawning of a new morning.

Let’s be here for each other,

Jeff

P.S. Profound appreciation to Anasa Troutman for her personal generosity in organizing this resource list.

LISTEN

White LIes

1619 Podcast

The Big We

Seeing White - Scene On The Radio

WATCH

Traces of The Trade

King In The Wilderness

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

I Am Not Your Negro

The Wellness of We

13th by Ava Duvernay

Eyes On The Prize

When They See Us

READ

Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad

Memphis Burning 

The Body is Not An Apology by Sonya Renee Taylor

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

How to be an anti-racist by Dr. Kendi

The Case For Reparations

A Timeline of Events That Led to the 2020 “Fed Up”-rising

For Those Battling in Paper Armor

Tomorrow, in America, we celebrate Memorial Day. We pause to honor and mourn the men and women of our Armed forces who have died in service to our country.

However, in this twisted time, a new global war conscripts a different type of soldier, wearing a different sort of uniform. Instead of Army Greens, this infantry dons scrubs, aprons, Pullman Brown and Dickies denims.

They are caring for our forgotten elders, stocking shelves and delivering supplies. They are toiling in fields, factories and warehouses to ensure the nation’s food chain functions. They are keeping our public transport on life support. They are nursing the ill and processing the dead.

This letter is an elegy to them.

The front lines are not the perilous, but fortified, desert camps. They are the subway tracks and outer-borough hospitals, the slaughterhouses and prisons, the distribution centers and grocery stores.

The heroism of this corps is not the glory stuff of Mandela and Chavez, though they are predominantly people of color. Their heroics are, instead, unheralded, nameless and fameless, fighting an invisible enemy that cannot be slain, only grimly flattened.

There is little grandeur to it. No medals. No Pomp and Circumstance. But, in this moment of collective heart-ache, they have kept us going. If vulnerability is synonymous with courage, then these folks are among history’s bravest. 

They have been dubbed “essential workers.” Yet they are so under-resourced that Sujatha Gidla, a New York City subway conductor, describes his colleagues not as essential but as sacrificial. The list of those we now remember grows: Yolanda Woodberry, who worked as a bus driver in Philadelphia for 17 years; Rakkhon Kim, a letter carrier in the Bronx; Saul Sanchez, Eduardo Conchas de la Cruz and Tibursio Rivera López, who all worked at the same meatpacking plant in Colorado.

As I type, I pull my Buff mask up over my stinging eyes in shame. The words of Gandhi haunt me, “the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members.” How can we let this happen?

Memorial Day. Summer opens its doors. A white-walled Studebaker rolls down Main Street. Old Sergeant Murphy, the last of the Greatest Generation rides shotgun, waving a pint-sized flag. The band blares Sousa. The beach house is unshuttered. We take the wire brush to the barbecue. A flapping roadside balloon man touts a clearance sale at the local Ford dealer. No, not this year.

It is bleak but there is a greater calling.

How do we properly honor these heroes?  Men and women who didn’t enlist to be the bulwark against apocalyptical chaos, but nevertheless showed up for battle in paper armor.

We can value thoughts and prayers, a commemorative wreath and a trumpet’s mournful Taps. But our hearts know this is not enough.

The lucky undrafted must undergo a deep moral inventory to determine how to fittingly exalt these inadvertent warriors, some of whom have made the ultimate sacrifice just by going to work.

It cannot be a mere gesture, a flimsy meme (or this insubstantial letter). Gratitude is the work and action we undertake that recognizes the gift that we have been given.

It begins with the explicit recognition that sanitation workers, emergency room nurses, grocery clerks and meatpackers have always been essential. They did not enlist for heroism nor court the grandiosity of the Blue Angels. In fact, in our hero worship, we risk absolving our own complicity in the atrocity of our structural failures.

What our essential workers desperately require is protective gear, a raise, comprehensive health care, proper sick leave, and organizations to advocate on their behalf.

They deserve access to well-being; movement, restoration and nutrition that reduce the conditions of comorbidity, stress and anxiety.

And, yes, they warrant the respect and support of our government, the most rudimentary return of their tax dollars.

If we are to honor them then we must demand that our leadership provide these basic needs and where they cannot, we must ask ourselves to furnish them where we can.

 Patriotism is not protesting mask-wearing on the capital’s steps. It is sacrificing so someone else’s child you don’t know in another state can have health insurance.

If there is any small tribute we can muster, it is to put aside our petty differences and individual material needs to find common decency, to better align our human condition with our highest principles.

For to honor the other is to honor the self, not only because we all share a divine nature, but because our very existence depends on them.

Let this Day of Remembrance draw upon the phantoms of our past and harness its pain to project a world that narrows the disparity of the human experience towards justice.

On Death

In January 2002, literally out of the ashes of 9/11, Schuyler opened Kula Yoga Project just blocks north of the World Trade Center. This humble little studio up 4 flights of cock-eyed lime green stairs became home for the bereaved denizens of lower Manhattan. My office, on the second floor, gave me a front row seat to witness the power of yoga and community to heal and help people rediscover their creative spark.

It bent the arc of my life. It led me to found Wanderlust and 13 years later move to Los Angeles and build Wanderlust Hollywood, an admittedly less humble center for yoga culture. I emptied my soul into building this place. Like a bedraggled chimneysweep out of a Dicken’s novel, I heaved myself out of the drywall soot every night with the vision of someday hosting the likes of Marianne Williamson, Deepak Chopra, Russell Brand, Wim Hof, Byron Katie and the other brilliant poets and mystics that gave my life meaning. It all happened.

In this very strange time, in the very same week, both Kula Tribeca and Wanderlust Hollywood closed their doors for good.

The meditator in me can appreciate that we are just experiencing transitory phenomena from moment to moment. But if I am the sky and emotions are just clouds, then I am shrouded in a fog of sorrow. I cannot pretend that these gathering places did not hold the sacred.

These passings are, of course, just small totems of a deeper global heartache.

The harsh awareness of our own mortality has never been more acute. The global pandemic, replete with its archetypes and memes;

the Grim reaper clutching a scythe collecting souls on a Miami beach and images of desolate post-apocalyptical urban streets, has shone a blinding light on our impermanence.

Part of being human is having the awareness of inevitable death. Homo sapiens roaming the Serengeti 100,000 years ago knew they were going to die, just like you and I know.

However, our conception of death has evolved significantly over the past few hundred years. Throughout the Middle Ages, death was inextricably fastened to religion. There was a sense of helpless resignation around our own mortality, as God served as playwright of life’s final act. 

When the Black Death emerged in the mid-14th century, it wasn’t traced by epidemiologists to a market in Wuhan. (Though, ironically, it now seems to have come from East Asia, as a virus carried by fleas on rats that were freighted along trade routes known as the Silk Road.)

This plague, which killed almost a third of the continent's population, was largely believed to be supernatural. Religious scholars taught that death by pestilence was a martyrdom, assuring the believer's place in paradise. For non-believers, it was a punishment.

The medical faculty of Philip VI in Paris blamed the heavens in the form of a conjunction of three planets that caused a "great pestilence in the air.” This explanation persisted as the miasma theory until modern germ theory took primacy in the late 1800’s through the work of Louis Pasteur. 

Until recently, for most of humanity, meaning in life was revealed through death, in the form of heaven, hell or reincarnation. In the after-life, all would be revealed. Our earthly occupation was an opening act to the eternal life.

As science has uncovered the genuine physiological causes for death, our relationship to mortality has evolved.  For better… and worse. It’s become a human engineering problem. Death is no longer the providence of God, it’s in the hands of doctors and scientists. As Yuval Harari posits, “when someone dies now, it’s generally someone’s fault.” 

We think of our current pandemic as a human mistake from its inception in the Wuhan market to our varying degrees of success in managing it worldwide. A comparison of fatality totals between the United States and New Zealand, for example, paints a stark political portrait of death. 

And, of course, the solution to the pandemic, the vaccine, is also squarely in human hands. While some may be praying in churches, synagogues and mosques, no one expects a pastor, in a moment of revelation, to pull a vaccine serum out from behind the pulpit. 

The development of the vaccine will take place in a lab by someone in white coat not a merlin’s cap. It will be a product of human knowledge that we expect as part of our Amazon prime account.

The human fixation with the afterlife has significantly waned. In a very short period of time, from an evolutionary standpoint, we have re-framed the meaning of life into very corporeal and ephemeral terms. It’s happening right here, right now, connected to our physiology. 

Science has certainly done a better job than religion in being flexible, applying trial and error as a method for analysis. But there is danger in ascribing “meaning” to our limited and uncertain lifespan and to presuming that we have undue power over our mortality.  We now live with a tremendous fear of death.

We marshal endless resources in keeping our elderly on life-support, despite terminal conditions, often leading to drawn-out, inhumane deaths. Our elders, once seen as the holders of ancient wisdom, are increasingly perceived as a burden, relegated to grim nursing homes.

Well-intentioned safety measures seemingly have no end. Charles Eisenstein addresses this idea beautifully in his article The Coronation. 

No more diving boards, endless helmeting and belting, home security systems, and a general distrust of the natural world.

And, of course, now, in the fever pitch of our pandemic-induced hysteria, we incessantly scrub our hands, avoid touching our own faces and relegate our social interactions to Zoom whenever possible.

Certainly, for a short period, we must cohere as a society for our mutual benefit. We can and should wear face masks, elbow bump and socially distance.

In the long term, however, how much are we willing to sacrifice in life in an attempt to avert death?

Are we willing to shutter our community centers, our yoga studios, our temples for music, sport and culture?

Are we willing to succumb to a surveillance culture that tracks our every move and encounter? 

Are we willing to give up on our own immune function? 

Are we willing to strip the life out of life for the sake of life?  

Has the shift from understanding death as a matter of God to a matter of science undermined any possibility of dying well? Has our fear of death given way to a fear of life?

We have become culturally obsessed with transcending our evolutionary biology. The longevity movement with its bio-hacks and gadgets is both fascinating and worrisome.

Research on hormesis, epigenetics, microbiome, inflammation and chronic disease is part of the exciting and relentless march of expanding human knowledge. 

If we can thrive physically and psychologically into our 100’s without depleting all of the earth’s resources, then I am all for trying.

But if life becomes a checklist of monitoring blood sugar levels, heart rate variability, ozone treatments, IV drips, home sterilizations, Zoom birthdays and anti-bacterial soap then I might prefer a grittier existence of family camping trips despite its inherent risks. 

Longevity is, of course, just a pit-stop in the War on Death on the road to immortality, as Harari suggests, to transform Homo Sapiens to Homo Deus, to become God.

You can only imagine the fear one would have knowing that every organ in their body could be regenerated or replaced. Would you ever even leave your house to risk your own immortality? 

Prior to scientific innovation, medicine was the realm of religion. Jesus was predominantly a healer. If someone fell ill, we summoned the witch doctor or the shaman. We can be grateful that science has wrested medicine from bloodletting, but what have we sacrificed in the process? 

For all of science’s great achievements, it has done little to solve the hard problem of consciousness or provide insight into why we are here and what is our purpose. That is best left in the hands of the spiritual. 

Despite all of the heart-wrenching suffering, the pandemic has offered humanity numerous opportunities, among them a pause for the re-assessment of life and death and what makes them sacred.

Now that we have hunkered down with our families stripped of many of the externalities of “normalcy”, many of us are discovering that a life of cooking, reading, walking, gardening, conversing, fixing, less flying and driving is more fulfilling than the hustle-bustle of dull care. We miss our community at-large but perhaps we see our neighbors and local essential workers in a new light.

Eastern traditions teach us that to be awakened is to be keenly aware of the present, to non-judgmentally witness transitory phenomena in the moment. Perhaps a life with meaning is simply focusing this consciousness on the elements of life that make it worthwhile. 

This includes embracing death, not as a sanctimonious rebirth, but as a quiet return home.

Does consciousness spring forth out of a fortuitous combination of atoms, only to terminate with physical death?  Or it is a wave that crests and, with death, dissolves into a vast, infinite ocean? What is the experience of what it’s like to be me after I die?  No one can know for certain. 

What is certain is that we are experiencing an unprecedented, collective illusion of dominion over the bodies we wear.  And that there is an inherent tension in our grasping for this control and our deeper yearning for meaning in this short life. Perhaps the solution to both is a shift from fear of death to a joy for life. 

Mothers: Crafting Beauty from Chaos

Last week, my wife-for-life, Schuyler, commemorated 50 orbits around the sun.

From the forced monasticism of quarantine, I etched her a clumsy love letter, alternately irreverent and doting. Having been yoked for 32 years, Schuyler and I have lost our taste for sanctimony and revel in verbal jousting. I share an excerpt with you here: 

I sought in you an absurd collection of archetypes;

Nurturing mother offering her soft breast

And lithe nymphet capable of whimsical handstands.

Resilient feminist bread-winner and occasional wanton Jezebel. 

Despite the lack of script,

your thespian pedigree has served you (and me) well.

You have played each character with aplomb and warrant nominations for numerous supporting roles.

The world anxiously awaits your next casting: nurse.

 I sit here, sheltering-in-place on Mother’s Day, watching her pirouette from task to task; wrangling our three daughters, keeping businesses afloat, sparring with Zoom to stream her next class.

And I am enveloped by a profound sense of awe and gratitude, not just for her, but for all mothers who walk the razor’s edge of both baking and earning the bread, nursing both child and parent.

I envision, somewhat ridiculously, Schuyler as Durga, the Hindu Goddess with a dozen arms, bearing the not the weapons of ancient India but the tools of modernity; battered iPhone, corporate prospectus, digital thermometer, cast-iron pan, reusable diaper, kitty litter box, father’s bedpan, and wheelbarrow of mulch. 

Mothers manage not just to tame chaos, but conduct it into symphonies, transform dots of disparate color into a Little Girl in a Blue Armchair.

Where patriarchy has attempted to standardize every component of life in the name of growth and operational efficiency, the mother perceives a sustainable beauty in the interconnected web of variety.

In this way, mothers are the holders of the sacred. They recognize the value in the unique and interrelated; the hand-sewn dress, the heirloom necklace, the local yoga studio, the garden-grown cock-eyed carrot.

Mother Nature, too, find its symbiosis in the vast bio-diversity of distinct plants and animals, each of whom she casts to play a small role in the glorious theatre of life.

For mothers, there is no single right answer or one single way to determine it. There is no false pride. There is nuance. There is “yes and…”

During Covid-19, we have witnessed our global female leaders foster social cohesion through a delicate balance of decisiveness and empathy. Without either chest thumping or sanctimony, female heads-of-state have produced superlative results through distributed leadership and emotional intelligence.

Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg deferred medical decisions to the scientists and took the unusual step of directly addressing the country’s children, telling them in two press conferences that it was “permitted to be a little bit scared.”

Armed with a doctorate in quantum chemistry, Germany’s Angela Merkel kept her country’s fatality toll under 5,000 through calm, clear public exposition and an unparalleled marshalling of the health care system.

Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand’s premier, went hard on early quarantining, while also delivering empathetic “stay home, save lives” videos from her couch. She embraced a kindness-first approach urging New Zealanders to look after their neighbors, take care of the vulnerable, and make sacrifices for the greater good.

Notably, Ardern gave birth to her first child last year in Auckland’s public hospital while serving as Prime Minister, becoming the first world leader to take maternity leave while in office.

Only 18 people have died of Covid-19 in New Zealand.

Women make great leaders for the same reason they make great parents; they flourish in the grey zone between question and answer, mystery and manifestation.  And this is what make our mothers – the great ones, the difficult ones, the complicated ones, the devoted ones – endlessly fascinating to us.

Our entire life is a journey back to our mothers, back to the peaceful belonging of the womb, back to the oneness; a re-matriation with the divine, the reunion of Jesus and Mary. As Elliot wrote, “to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

We pause today to honor all mothers, including our Mother Earth. And to pray this fraught time can serve as a modern Annunciation, that a new savior will be born within the divine mother of each of us, one that inspires us to craft beauty from chaos.

Revolution of the Heart

I have been learning Giant Steps on the piano. Penned by the legendary saxophonist John Coltrane in 1959, it was a revolutionary piece of music that upended the traditional harmony of be-bop jazz. It became a litmus test among players, distinguishing the neophytes from those capable of fusing virtuosic chops and emotional magnificence. But it wasn’t Coltrane’s technical prowess that bent the arc of music.

Coltrane challenged the status quo with a deep expression of the heart; profound wailings from the spiritual well, built atop the technical well. We heard him not with our ears, we heard him with our soul. 

Yet here I am, plodding through it as if I am taking a multiple-choice driver’s test, just praying I can get to the end with enough right answers, and my mind wanders to this:

 What are the components of great art? And, perhaps, by extension, a great society?

 Certainly, it’s not just technical ability.  Great music is not a stream of perfectly executed scales. Portraiture is not meant to mirror photography. Soaring oratory is not a recitation of facts (though I’ll take some facts right now 😉).

In art, we thirst to unshackle ourselves from the ordered ordinary, to wander into the limbic. No matter how well-sanded any prose might be, if it doesn’t give me a splinter, if I don’t cry or laugh when writing it, if my heart does not leap in some fashion, then it is bound for the dustbin.  

Epiphanous art alloys technique and expression, empiricism and revelation, head and heart. And when transcendent creation springs forth, there is a remarkable effect: We all feel the same. 

 This is how the club, theatre, or gallery becomes a church. We walk in atomized, individuals among separate individuals, until we are enveloped by the voluptuous heart; a musical crescendo, or a piercingly authentic monologue, and suddenly everyone is wearing the same rapt expression.

In a way, we become the music, as notions of time, space, location and form – the elements that so often define our individual human experience – dissolve. The curtain pulls back on the illusory nature of self.

This synchronicity of humanity cannot be simply explained through neuroscience. Why have we evolved to both create and experience transcendence through art, so that viewing a beautiful piece of art gives us the same feeling as being in love. We may all be simultaneously emitting dopamine. But the real question is why?  What is this mystical force that animates the collective unconscious?

And as the reflection of our collective art, is culture any different? If our human experience walks the tightrope of the material and immaterial, then so must culture.

Increasingly, though, we dwell solely in the material world; one that defines us by our possessions and job titles, one in which we interact as transactional units, one that feels like my elementary school music teacher’s metronomic rendition of Giant Steps, always regurgitated at 3 minutes, 40 seconds long. 

The Enlightenment ushered in reason, rationality and the scientific method. And we built the systems and structures of modernity around these principles, often for damn good reason. 

Liberal democracy, in theory, tabulates the will of the people, a marked improvement from the divine right of kings. Capitalism maintains social stability through a (supposed) mutually beneficial economic relationship between people and it has lifted throngs out of serfdom. 

Science and reason have built the piping of society, the road and bridges, the factories and skyscrapers, the infrastructure that girds our busy lives. Technology has provided us with medical advancements that save lives and alleviate pain, agricultural technology that could feed all the citizens of the world, an Internet that democratizes access to education and information. 

However, inherent to science and its method is value neutrality. We increasingly live in structures and systems that have become inhumane, devoid of the ethics of the heart. The result is too often medical innovation gets channeled towards the pharmaceutical industry, agricultural advancement is sponsored by Monsanto, and the Internet is leveraged to spread misinformation and commodify our habits.

For America, or anywhere, to be great again, we must once again find our hearts. 

We are collectively craving epiphany, often historically manifested by the uniting of inspiration and action: Moses parting the sea to lead the Israelites out of slavery; Martin Luther King marching across the bridge in Selma (an act often called praying with his feet); Julia Butterfly Hill living in a 180-foot-tall tree for 738 days to protest old-growth clear-cutting. 

 If great art merges the mechanical and mystical, then should not our society also value them in equal measure?

Are we not aching for brave leadership centered in the heart? 

Are we not thirsting to once again all feel the same?

This is the moment to discard our petty political labels and let the heart usher us into the church of our common humanity.

Now is the time to set down the armaments of our reasoned positions, remove our armor, and speak and listen to each other from the heart.

The spiritual heart holds the sacred truths echoed by every prophet – love, compassion and empathy – and thus the heart should set the coordinates of our systems and structures.

This is the Giant Step the world now beckons us to take: Like John Coltrane, we must challenge the status quo with a Revolution of the Heart.

The New Frontier

In 1960, President Kennedy captivated our collective imagination with The New Frontier. This bold vison proposed the unfathomable notion of putting a man on the moon.

 It took nine years, but when Apollo 11 transmitted those first images taken from space, it forever changed our relationship to the planet we call home. Surely you have seen them; a beautiful, delicate singular orb, luminescent green-blue without the imaginary lines of nationhood; one world unfractured by distinctions of race, religion, ethnicity, or sexual preference.

It is no wonder that, in 1970, less than a year after the Giant Leap, we celebrated the first Earth Day, established the EPA, made major amendments to the Clean Air Act and, two years later, passed the Clean Water Act. 

 We were galvanized into action by a vision bigger than ourselves. Our consciousness shifted. A critical mass of individuals worldwide imagined a better version of ourselves as stewards of a shared planet.  But this proved to be a fragile revolution.

 Fifty years after the first Earth Day, we find ourselves in a wicked paradox. While humans have fallen ill, Mother Nature has shown signs of emergent well-being. 

The skies have cleared. For the first time in decades, the Himalayas have become visible on the Indian horizon. Since Italy went into lockdown, NO2 levels in Milan have fallen by about 40 percent. Los Angeles has seen a 30 percent decrease in PM2.5, a form of pollution composed of particles smaller than a strand of human hair that cause lung disease and heart ailments. Earth Systems Professor Marshall Burke estimates that the decrease in PM2.5 likely saved 77,000 lives in China alone.

The Venice canals are resplendently aglow, sheep crowd the crosswalks of Scotland, and traffic levels in Britain are equivalent to 1955. The price of oil crashed because literally there is no place to store the surplus. We’re not using it. 

Certainly, a global pandemic is not a long-term moral solution to our planetary dis-ease. The loss of human life is not an environmental strategy.

How do we leverage this inflection point for our collective benefit, to re-envision a sustainable tenancy on this planet while also honoring the disparity of human experiences in this moment?

Many are sick, some are dying. Some are on the front lines. Many have lost work. And others are hunkered down, in a coerced monasticism, vacillating between anxiety and the epiphany that less may be more. Of those who have paid the ultimate price, the data is showing that they are also disproportionally the most vulnerable amongst us, toiling in essential jobs that cannot be done on Zoom.

My instinct tells me that, in order to right ourselves, the world will need to withstand a lot of pain. And that pain will not be evenly distributed when Nature collects it debt.

But is there a degree of “suffering" that we must endure to ensure the health of the planet and our viability on it?  

Can the world endure hundreds of millions unemployed in service of right-sizing the Chinese coal industry, factory farming, Exxon-Mobil, Aramco, Coca-Cola, Nestle, McDonald’s and others that engage in unsustainable practices?

Can we sacrifice the convenience of fast food, overnight shipping, whimsical travel and pre-packaged everything? 

Can we find the will to upturn the systems and structures that have desecrated the earth in the name of commercial profits? 

Can we honor those who have passed through the instantiation of a new world story that breaks the narrative that we exist separate from nature?

Can we re-apply the notion of growth from corporate top-line to human happiness?

If we grapple with these sacrifices now, small and large, individual and collective, can we avert the looming cataclysms of environmental breakdown? No matter how challenging this moment, this suffering cowers in the impending menace of drought and starvation, fire and flood, mass migration and war that an overexploited planet promises.

 We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier. However, we seek not the stars, but an inner reckoning. We must now do the soulful work of determining our true needs and sources of fulfillment; to revise everything from our global economy to our daily pleasures. And to manifest this discovery with profound acts of conscience, creativity, and sacrifice in service of humanity and our planet.

On this 50th Earth Day, we bend this refrain for our New Frontier: “Ask not what your planet can do for you, ask what you can do for your planet.”

We Are Enough

Soon enough, you will feel the gale force winds of corporate globalism chafing your face. It will scream, “Back to normal!”, a clarion call to return to the shopping mall, book that vacation trip, buy that new television. These messages will be cloaked in patriotic slogans like “support American workers.” 

 The refrain of unbridled global capitalism will once again trumpet images of unattainable success and perfection in an attempt to convince you that you are not enough. And then market you trinkets and services to address your perceived deficiencies. 

 If only, and only if, you buy this designer dress… will you be beautiful. 

 Of course, the rush of excitement fades almost as soon as you open the box. But also consider the journey of that dress; from the cotton fields of Arkansas to the yarn-making factories of Indonesia; the cloth was made, cut and dyed in Bangladesh and sewn in a Chinese sweatshop, shipped to a distribution center in Bakersfield, trucked to an H&M in Anaheim; and finally ... to you. 

 Now that we have felt the looming shadow of the grim reaper, Armageddon’s hot breath on our neck. Now that we’ve hunkered down with our families; cooking, reading, praying, walking, crying, laughing … holding each other tighter than before, sometimes from six feet away. Now that we have awakened to what makes life sacred and worthwhile, we know this:

 We are enough. Right here in our pajamas. We are enough. 

 We can envision a new human story, once obscured by smog, but now visible on the horizon, not solely because we’ve awakened, but because we stopped spewing filth into our skies. 

 Now we know that not only does endless consumption not serve us but it also does not serve the worker, American or foreign. It contributes to a society where three people own more wealth than 50% of the population combined, to a country that has left our most vulnerable citizens destitute on the streets, to a system that has under-equipped our brave health care workers. 

 In our quarantine, something shifted. Quietly, as if out of a collective unconscious, we all imagined the same thing:

 We have imagined a local, community-based approach to living with systems and structures engineered at human-scale, not at global industrial scale. 

 We have imagined new indices of success measured by how we treat our most vulnerable citizens and our planet.

 We have imagined a new enlightenment which alloys science with the universal spiritual principles echoed across all traditions: love, compassion, empathy and tolerance.

 We have imagined a world in which we own less things, lest we be owned by our things. 

 This is my humble prayer: As we are beckoned back to “normalcy” let us not be tempted by the siren call of consumption. Let us remember that bending the arc of history can start in your backyard with a garden and by bringing chicken soup to a sick neighbor. Let us remember the things that, in our shelter, made life worthwhile. Let us remember that we are enough.