The science behind what makes this coronavirus so sneaky, deadly and difficult to defeat

By Sarah Kaplan, William Wan and Joel Achenbach 

March 23, 2020 at 8:36 a.m. PDT (WashingtonPost.com)

Viruses have spent billions of years perfecting the art of surviving without living — a frighteningly effective strategy that makes them a potent threat in today’s world.

That’s especially true of the deadly new coronavirus that has brought global society to a screeching halt. It’s little more than a packet of genetic material surrounded by a spiky protein shell one-thousandth the width of an eyelash, and it leads such a zombielike existence that it’s barely considered a living organism.

But as soon as it gets into a human airway, the virus hijacks our cells to create millions more versions of itself.

Researchers hope new visualization of SARS-CoV-2 will show them how to defeat it.

There is a certain evil genius to how this coronavirus pathogen works: It finds easy purchase in humans without them knowing. Before its first host even develops symptoms, it is already spreading its replicas everywhere, moving onto its next victim. It is powerfully deadly in some but mild enough in others to escape containment. And for now, we have no way of stopping it.

As researchers race to develop drugs and vaccines for the disease that has already sickened 350,000 and killed more than 15,000 people, and counting, this is a scientific portrait of what they are up against.

‘Between chemistry and biology’

Respiratory viruses tend to infect and replicate in two places: In the nose and throat, where they are highly contagious, or lower in the lungs, where they spread less easily but are much more deadly.

This new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, adeptly cuts the difference. It dwells in the upper respiratory tract, where it is easily sneezed or coughed onto its next victim. But in some patients, it can lodge itself deep within the lungs, where the disease can kill. That combination gives it the contagiousness of some colds, along with some of the lethality of its close molecular cousin SARS, which caused a 2002-2003 outbreak in Asia.

Showing how a disease spreads | How to be a journalist covering coronavirusThe most-read story in Washington Post history explains how an outbreak like coronavirus spreads and what it takes to “flatten the curve.” (The Washington Post)

Another insidious characteristic of this virus: By giving up that bit of lethality, its symptoms emerge less readily than those of SARS, which means people often pass it to others before they even know they have it.

It is, in other words, just sneaky enough to wreak worldwide havoc.

Q&A: What if I think I’m infected?

Viruses much like this one have been responsible for many of the most destructive outbreaks of the past 100 years: the flus of 1918, 1957 and 1968; and SARS, MERS and Ebola. Like the coronavirus, all these diseases are zoonotic — they jumped from an animal population into humans. And all are caused by viruses that encode their genetic material in RNA.

That’s no coincidence, scientists say. The zombielike existence of RNA viruses makes them easy to catch and hard to kill.

Outside a host, viruses are dormant. They have none of the traditional trappings of life: metabolism, motion, the ability to reproduce.

And they can last this way for quite a long time. Recent laboratory research showed that, although SARS-CoV-2 typically degrades in minutes or a few hours outside a host, some particles can remain viable — potentially infectious — on cardboard for up to 24 hours and on plastic and stainless steel for up to three days. In 2014, a virus frozen in permafrost for 30,000 years that scientists retrieved was able to infect an amoeba after being revived in the lab.

When viruses encounter a host, they use proteins on their surfaces to unlock and invade its unsuspecting cells. Then they take control of those cells’ molecular machinery to produce and assemble the materials needed for more viruses.

“It’s switching between alive and not alive,” said Gary Whittaker, a Cornell University professor of virology. He described a virus as being somewhere “between chemistry and biology.”

Among RNA viruses, coronaviruses — named for the protein spikes that adorn them like points of a crown — are unique for their size and relative sophistication. They are three times bigger than the pathogens that cause dengue, West Nile and Zika, and are capable of producing extra proteins that bolster their success.

“Let’s say dengue has a tool belt with only one hammer,” said Vineet Menachery, a virologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch. This coronavirus has three different hammers, each for a different situation.

Among those tools is a proofreading protein, which allows coronaviruses to fix some errors that happen during the replication process. They can still mutate faster than bacteria but are less likely to produce offspring so riddled with detrimental mutations that they can’t survive.

Meanwhile, the ability to change helps the germ adapt to new environments, whether it’s a camel’s gut or the airway of a human unknowingly granting it entry with an inadvertent scratch of her nose.

Scientists believe that the SARS virus originated as a bat virus that reached humans via civet cats sold in animal markets. This current virus, which can also be traced to bats, is thought to have had an intermediate host, possibly an endangered scaly anteater called a pangolin.

“I think nature has been telling us over the course of 20 years that, ‘Hey, coronaviruses that start out in bats can cause pandemics in humans, and we have to think of them as being like influenza, as long-term threats,’” said Jeffery Taubenberger, virologist with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Funding for research on coronaviruses increased after the SARS outbreak, but in recent years that funding has dried up, Taubenberger said. Such viruses usually simply cause colds and were not considered as important as other viral pathogens, he said.

The search for weapons

Once inside a cell, a virus can make 10,000 copies of itself in a matter of hours. Within a few days, the infected person will carry hundreds of millions of viral particles in every teaspoon of his blood.

The onslaught triggers an intense response from the host’s immune system: Defensive chemicals are released. The body’s temperature rises, causing fever. Armies of germ-eating white blood cells swarm the infected region. Often, this response is what makes a person feel sick.

Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at Johns Hopkins University, compared viruses to particularly destructive burglars: They break into your home, eat your food, use your furniture and have 10,000 babies. “And then they leave the place trashed,” he said.

Unfortunately, humans have few defenses against these burglars.

Most antimicrobials work by interfering with the functions of the germs they target. For example, penicillin blocks a molecule used by bacteria to build their cell walls. The drug works against thousands of kinds of bacteria, but because human cells don’t use that protein, we can ingest it without being harmed.

But viruses function through us. With no cellular machinery of their own, they become intertwined with ours. Their proteins are our proteins. Their weaknesses are our weaknesses. Most drugs that might hurt them would hurt us, too.

For this reason, antiviral drugs must be extremely targeted and specific, said Stanford virologist Karla Kirkegaard. They tend to target proteins produced by the virus (using our cellular machinery) as part of its replication process. These proteins are unique to their viruses. This means the drugs that fight one disease generally don’t work across multiple ones.

And because viruses evolve so quickly, the few treatments scientists do manage to develop don’t always work for long. This is why scientists must constantly develop new drugs to treat HIV, and why patients take a “cocktail” of antivirals that viruses must mutate multiple times to resist.

“Modern medicine is constantly needing to catch up to new emerging viruses,” Kirkegaard said.

SARS-CoV-2 is particularly enigmatic. Though its behavior is different from that of its cousin SARS, there are no obvious differences in the viruses’ spiky protein “keys” that allow them to invade host cells.

Understanding these proteins could be critical to developing a vaccine, said Alessandro Sette, head of the center for infectious disease at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology. Previous research has shown that the spike proteins on SARS are what trigger the immune system’s protective response. In a paper published this month, Sette found the same is true of SARS-CoV-2.

This gives scientists reason for optimism, according to Sette. It affirms researchers’ hunch that the spike protein is a good target for vaccines. If people are inoculated with a version of that protein, it could teach their immune system to recognize the virus and allow them to respond to the invader more quickly.

“It also says the novel coronavirus is not that novel,” Sette said.

And if SARS-CoV-2 is not so different from its older cousin SARS, then the virus is probably not evolving very fast, giving scientists developing vaccines time to catch up.

In the meantime, Kirkegaard said, the best weapons we have against the coronavirus are public health measures, such as testing and social distancing, and our own immune systems.

Some virologists believe we have one other thing working in our favor: the virus itself.

For all its evil genius and efficient, lethal design, Kirkegaard said, “the virus doesn’t really want to kill us. It’s good for them, good for their population, if you’re walking around being perfectly healthy.”

Evolutionarily speaking, experts believe, the ultimate goal of viruses is to be contagious while also gentle on their hosts — less a destructive burglar and more a considerate house guest.

That’s because highly lethal viruses like SARS and Ebola tend to burn themselves out, leaving no one alive to spread them.

But a germ that’s merely annoying can perpetuate itself indefinitely. One 2014 study found that the virus causing oral herpes has been with the human lineage for 6 million years. “That’s a very successful virus,” Kirkegaard said.

Seen through this lens, the novel coronavirus that is killing thousands across the world is still early in its life. It replicates destructively, unaware that there’s a better way to survive.

But bit by bit, over time, its RNA will change. Until one day, not so far in the future, it will be just another one of the handful of common cold coronaviruses that circulate every year, giving us a cough or sniffle and nothing more.

Link to audio: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

By Deena Metzger | March 26, 2020 (tikkun.org)

Deena Metzger: Elephants

[Editor’s note: By seeing this virus as another manifestation of the life-destroying
consequences of the form of life we humans have been living, Deena Metzger’s prophetic voice gives us a context to understand this latest pandemic and how it can teach humanity a vital message. We at Tikkun have been proud to have articles from Deena Metzger, whose novel A Rain of Night Birds was reviewed on our website by Cynthia Travis on October 11, 2018. In 2019 we published her amazing essay on extinction illness. Now she extends her analysis to the current pandemic. –Rabbi Michael Lerner. rabbilerner.tikkun@gmail.com]

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—
and there was no one left to speak for me.

–Martin Niemöller[i]

First the animals began dying, going extinct, and we did not stop
what we were doing because we are not animals.
Then the glaciers started melting and we did not stop
what we were doing because we thought we could do without them.
Then the forests were disappearing and we did not stop
cutting down the trees
because we could not imagine being unable to breathe.
Then the virus came and there was no one to stop us
but ourselves.

There is a passageway between life and death. It partakes of the sacred. It is not of this world or of the other. It is in between the two and is of uncertain length and development, sometimes dense and sometimes luminous. The passageway is called Dying. What happens in this place is a great mystery. Everyone will walk it. There is no map but there are questions to hold and consider. The path toward healing from a life-threatening illness is the same path as preparing for a good death.

When people realize they have a life-threatening illness, they begin to re-examine their lives, considering deeply what matters and what should fall away. This deep soul journey parallels the physical process of dying itself when so much that we have fervently insisted is indispensable to us, falls away, becomes irrelevant, and what has meaning and is really essential is respected. When, if we are lucky and recover from what has threatened to devastate us entirely, we begin our lives again, we know we cannot, must not, return to how we were living before, we cannot return to the ways that were killing us and others.

I had breast cancer in 1977. I asked these questions: What is the message of this illness that comes to me in this form? What is the meaning of this illness, in particular, coming to me, in particular, at this time, in particular? What have I been unable to understand or have ignored until it comes in this life-threatening form?

I knew immediately that I had to change my life drastically, down to the cellular level. And I did. It was not easy; the process was long, difficult, disturbing and is on-going. It continues through this day. Gradually, I understood that even as I was ill and wanting to preserve my own life, I had to shift to consider the whole. I was confronted by this need from the very beginning. A colleague visited me in the hospital and asked me to forgo any thoughts I had of healing cancer myself, as, he said, even if I had the skill to do it, there were many women who would follow my example and they were not prepared. I agreed then to have a mastectomy. But, I also chose not to have chemotherapy or radiation. The tumor was small and the entire breast removed. Both decisions were my way of considering the welfare of all beings. Not a formula, but the soul searching of a forty-year old woman with two young children wrestling with how to meet life-threatening illness and not cause harm to the environment or the community.

Then something inexplicable occurred – I felt the reality of Spirit. At the moment of fearing dying, Spirit appeared. A contradiction I could not deny. Not God in the way of my tradition, not religion, but God, Spirit, as peoples have perceived the Radiant Presence over the millennia of our emergence. I was in awe. Not because I could pray for my healing, but because I understood that any act of healing for myself should be equally benevolent for all, should do no harm. I was wrapped in a story and circumstances that would allow me to be responsible to the deepest aspects of my soul and to the world – no conflict – my life, my family’s life, the community’s life, the Earth, the same. Spirit had brought me here.

In the raw and necessary dialogue a person has with life-threatening illness, it is often clear that far beneath the medical diagnosis is another deep knowing—the ultimate cause of the illness is not the rogue malignant cell or an organ failing – these are the manifestations which we think we know how to treat – but our very life style, our way of life, our lives. Then the process of looking for healing from a life-threatening illness becomes self-scrutiny. When we ask, “Given what I now understand, how then shall I live?” we know that living requires us to ruthlessly, radically change our lives.
The terrible truth is that our way of life that has tragically become global, has been killing the planet for a long time and for that length of time, despite the increase in life expectancy and the wonders of technology, it has been killing us. We didn’t know it was killing us though we knew it was killing someone in Africa, Latin America or the Middle East, somewhere away from us, maybe someone in the Inner Cities, or living on a Native reservation, but still a distance. We knew that one life form after another was going extinct. We knew we are killing the water, the air, the Earth, but we were safe we thought, our ways, our things, our technology, our systems, our money would protect us. We couldn’t conceive they would fail us. We couldn’t conceive today.

I have spent the last days in consultation with my mind and soul. I needed to understand that I have a life-threatening illness and will probably die soon. Not because I am old but because of Covid-19, what threatens all of us. We went round and round, confronting and ducking, until I knew that this is true. I am going to die. I have little time. This means I must also abandon all the reflexes, thoughts, assumptions, plans which assume a long future. How, then, shall I live?

I had to know at my core that what we are in is about to kill many of us, if not all of us, in the domino effect of all the systems going down, one after another. I had to know this about my own life so I can make decisions about what matters and what does not matter. I had to know how to relinquish everything that does not serve life and the future of life on this planet. I had to know where I am colluding with those aspects of our culture that are doing so much harm. So that I can, every day, every moment, let go of what is inessential or an illusion so I can be faithful to what is essential. So I can live a devoted life. Had I not done this; I couldn’t write this piece. I had to know this so what I write and post is true. This is the time for stringent honesty and searing truth telling. That’s how things are in the passageway of dying – there is no time for lies or for pretense, particularly to ourselves.

So hard a path. But here is the strange thing, this virus is entirely democratic. Every person on the planet is in danger of dying of it, the chances increase each day, exponentially. Not only you, but your children, your loved ones. And so we all are suffering a life-threatening disease whether or not we are infected at this moment. This mysterious tiny being, whose life and meaning we barely understand, is potentially taking down an entire species that thought itself immortal. Here we are.

***

Let me change the language. We are suffering a species-threatening disease.

***

Here is a passage from the beginning of Doris Lessing’s remarkable, prescient novel, Shikasta:

An individual may be told she, he, is to die, and will accept it. For the species will go on. Her or his children will die, and even absurdly and arbitrarily — but the species will go on. But that a whole species, or race, will cease or drastically change — no, that cannot be taken in, accepted, not without a total revolution of the deepest self.
To identify with ourselves as individuals — that is the very essence of the Degenerative Disease…. What I had to say would strike at everything we valued most, for it could be no comfort here to be told: You will survive as individuals.[ii]

The Elephants know the herd is going extinct. The Whales know. The Wolves know. The birds falling from the skies know.

Be with me, with us, now. Imagine their grief. Enter the Whales’ or the Wolves’ body/heart, and feel their exquisite and common grief knowing their pod, their pack, itself, is threatened. Forever.

Now feel the Earth’s grief, her anguish as the essential and interconnected beings who create an intricate dynamic structure through their loving alliances, fall away, like the heart falling out of the body, and Earth knowing she cannot survive when they are gone. Her anguish. Their anguish. Ours???

***

What does one do when one has a life-threatening illness for which there is no cure and no treatment, no medicine, no protection, no money, no resources, no help? The non-humans simply bear the terrible knowledge of doom for they are helpless to change what is occurring.

Sometimes we see individual rebellion or revenge, the Lions who ate the poachers, the Elephant who finds the opportunity to stampede the vicious animal trainer in the circus or zoo, or attacks the one who orders her about with a metal hook in her flesh, or the young bull Elephant who remembers the hunter who killed the Matriarch for her tusks and attacks him twenty years later. But as species, knowing they are helpless to change conditions, they succumb. They go extinct, even though they know their disappearance will undermine the ecosystem with dire consequences for all.

Humans have another possibility. We enter the process of deep soul inquiry. What are the underlying causes of this wretched affliction? How can we divest from what is killing us? How shall we meet these times? How shall we live?

Isn’t it strange that across the world, more and more people, millions and millions, are now confined to their homes, prohibited from leaving except to risk their lives to procure the most basic necessities? We have all been assigned to solitude, to stillness, to introspection. An entire planet on a spiritual retreat. A good portion, and increasing, of human beings, particularly those in urban centers, confined with the unique opportunity to deeply contemplate our lives. For a month? For two months? For eighteen months? For our lifetimes? An instant in the universe but long enough in human time to begin to imagine the unimaginable, what we were not able to imagine before: A different world manifested out of our heartbreak for what has brought us here and our increasing great love for life which comes when we feel it slipping away.

And it happened in a moment: slam dunk. What could not be accomplished after millennia of religious and spiritual urging. Slam dunk. Slam dunk we are in isolation and everything is coming to a halt. Slam dunk, then, we have to change. Maybe we can. Slam dunk.

A spiritual initiation of the highest order.

Initiation is Spirit’s way of breaking us down so that we might be recreated in a wisdom way. This is an astounding and awesome initiation by Spirit. It is one of the ways illness transforms us. And so again.

How will we experience this? Each of us differently. We don’t know how and won’t know for a long time. But we have the time. Eighteen months, some say. And in this liminal moment, this passage between one world and another, let dying strip us down to the heart as dying does, and begin again. It is a little like a bone marrow transplant –- the marrow is of the only culture that can survive these times, the one in which our species and the other species all thrive together, one that is committed to the life force of all beings, which, hopefully, will include us again.

Welcome to the fact and the initiation of Dying. “Queen Corona,” as someone said today, thank you.

—
[i] Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent
Lutheran pastor in Germany. He emerged as an
outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the
last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration
camps. He is perhaps best remembered for his postwar
words.
[ii] Re: Colonised Planet 5 Shikasta, by Doris
Lessing, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1979, P.38SHARETWEET EMAILMORE

ABOUT DEENA METZGER

Deena Metzger is a writer and healer living at the end of the road in Topanga, California. She is the founder and convener of ReVisioning Medicine that was initiated as a keynote for the American Holistic Medical Association in 2004. She has hosted Daré for 19 years, community gatherings on behalf of healing and vision, at her home which is considered a village sanctuary for all beings. Her books which speak to this issue include Writing For Your Life; Tree: Essays and Pieces; Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (edited with Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson); and her most recent novels, La Negra y Blanca, winner of 2012 Oakland PEN Award for Literature and A Rain of Night Birds. deenametzger@icloud.com and deenametzger.net.

Mount Sinai to Begin the Transfer of COVID-19 Antibodies into Critically Ill Patients

March 26, 2020

During this time of upheaval and self-isolation due to the coronavirus, it is very helpful, even essential, for all of us to stretch ourselves toward the Universe. How do we do this? Today we will practice GAZING or SEEING WITH NEW EYES!

More podcasts at: https://heathersdrawing.podbean.com/

A pandemic is fertile ground for those who suffer from anxiety—here’s a short guide on how to manage it.

The Guardian|getpocket.com

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

A couple gazes over Lake Washington in Kirkland, Washington. As the coronavirus pandemic has spread, officials have advised social distancing from crowds to avoid contracting Covid-19. Photo by John Moore / Getty Images.

When news of the coronavirus broke at the end of last year, and as the stories from the outbreak became more alarming over time, I found myself wondering how health anxiety sufferers were coping.

You see, I used to be one. In late 2015, I suffered a post-traumatic stress disorder relapse which led to debilitating anxiety, much of which was health-related. During that period, I was paralyzed by the thought of becoming ill and dying. I was constantly checking for symptoms and signs of disease online and I was fixated on the health of my loved ones.

After treatment, including trauma-focused CBT, I almost completely recovered. But I remember vividly how it felt to be in an all-consuming state of panic. For many months, it ruled my entire existence. Approximately 40 million American adults – roughly 18 percent of the population – have an anxiety disorder, while in the UK there were 8.2 million cases of anxiety in 2013. There are few statistics about health anxiety, but it can affect those who have an existing anxiety disorder or those who have experienced a life event such as bereavement, birth trauma or an accident. In times like these, where a global pandemic is taking up most of the media conversation, it can be even more difficult to stay calm.

Here is some advice that may give some comfort to those of you who are struggling.

1) Avoid the (Health-Related) News

We all want to keep up to date, but when you have health anxiety the need to check and read the latest updates can become compulsive, feeding the anxiety. Try having a news detox, or allocating yourself a time limit for reading or watching news. If you’re really worried about missing something crucial, you can always tell friends and family to contact you in the event of an emergency situation in order to keep you informed.

2) Try Not to Seek Constant Reassurance

Seeking reassurance can make you feel calmer for a little while, but in my experience, it is always temporary. Your brain creates a feedback cycle where you become increasingly reliant on reassurance, which only serves to reinforce the anxiety. It’s natural to want your loved ones to tell you things will be OK, but when you start needing that reassurance several times a day it’s time to take a step back.

3) Introduce an Absolute Ban on Googling Symptoms

Dr Google is not, and never will be, your friend, especially not when you are a sufferer of health anxiety. Nor will message-boards and forums. Try to remember that people visit these places when they have reason to be concerned. Once you start understanding it’s a skewed lens, you’ll be better able to put things in perspective

4) Try a Countering Technique

This is a CBT exercise which involves giving a persistent thought the courtroom treatment, by confronting it with a rational counter-statement. For example, if your persistent thought is something like “Everyone I love will die from this virus” you can counter it with factual statements such as “Actually, most people who get Covid-19 are likely to make a full recovery, and that’s assuming mum, dad and my little sister will even catch it at all.” As my mother always says: “Just because you think something, doesn’t make it true.”

5) Do Some Exercise

Even if it’s just star jumps in your bedroom, or shaking your body parts like you’re in the warm-up section of a hippie acting class, exercise will help get the adrenaline out of your system and channel the panic elsewhere.

6) Breathing and Grounding Exercises

From guided yogic breathing to using a strong smell (I favored lavender oil), grounding exercises can help bring you back to reality. I also found bending over to touch my toes and then very slowly standing up starting at the base of my spine to be beneficial, as it centers me.You can look for examples online, but sometimes, something as simple as sitting on the floor can help.

7) Allocate Yourself a Daily ‘Worry Period’

Give yourself half an hour to worry about this to your heart’s content, and then you have to go and do something else.

8) Treat Yourself

Anything that will give you a little boost can help. It doesn’t need to involve spending money: you can also cook yourself something nice, have a hot bath, or listen to a song you love.

9) Remember That Your Anxious State Isn’t Permanent

When you are in it, anxiety always feels as though it will never end, but it will. It’s hard to remember this, but do try. I genuinely thought that I would never recover, and now even though we are in a public health crisis, I feel calm and have things in perspective. It’s a worrying time, and many of us, myself included, will have loved ones who might be showing symptoms, but the tendency to jump to the worst-case scenario very rarely reflects reality. Be kind to yourself. It may be a bit cheesy, but this too shall pass.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author. Her novel The Tyranny of Lost Things was published in 2018.

This article was originally published on March 16, 2020, by The Guardian, and is republished here with permission.

What my therapist said when she closed her office because of coronavirus.

BY AYU SUTRIASA  MAR 24, 2020 (Yesmagazine.org)

Hello sweet one. I see how much you care about the world, about your communities, about all of us surviving plagues and capitalism and a world on fire.

That clench in your throat, the knot in your gut, the tightness in your breath — this is how our bodies try to hold the world’s anguish. We write the wrongness into our bodies, a beautiful and devastating lament.

Just because your body can hold all the tragedy, the panic, the tension, that it is holding right now, that doesn’t mean that you must go on holding it, all, forever. The loving grandmother in you knows this to be true.

Set it down. Somewhere nearby, so you can pick it up again when you need to, but just for a moment, relinquish your illusions of control. Allow yourself to See the many-headed Truth monster: it might not all be okay. It might end in flames and death and horror, no matter what you do. Take a moment to acknowledge how fucking awful and sad that Truth is. And how not even the worst possible scenario would take away from your inherent worthiness.

Simultaneously, it is True that human beings have always fought for one another, cared for one another fiercely, and carried the world’s anguish in our bodies. And there are small Truths, like that we cannot control the future, no matter how much we wish we could. (Don’t worry when the Truths contradict one another, real Truths often do.)

No matter what, whether it turns out okay in the end or not, you carry the Divine within you. You are Enough, not because of the things you do but because of who you are fundamentally. Intrinsically. Always and without exception. Take a breath or two to allow yourself to Know this.

And when we pick up the anxiety again, let us aim for flexibility. Movement space for breath to get in and out of your rib cage, gentleness for the things we can’t do, and Integrity giving us the strength and resolve to turn our sometimes-excruciating caring into solidarity, mutual aid, and direct action.

We are each one person, breathing this one breath, with common Divinity.

We can do this. Together.

Note: This poem was an email response from my therapist when she closed her office because of coronavirus. The author has given permission for YES! to publish it, but wishes to remain anonymous. —Ayu Sutriasa

---

AYU SUTRIASA is the digital editor for YES! CONNECT:  LinkedIn

By Maria Popova (brainpickings.org)

“Our origins are of the earth,” Rachel Carson wrote in contemplating science and our spiritual bond with nature.“And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity.” By channeling this elemental human response in immensely lyrical prose about the science of the natural world — a testament to Susan Sontag’s assertion that “information will never replace illumination” — Carson awakened the modern environmental conscience and pioneered a new aesthetic of writing and thinking about the poetic truths radiating from the facts of physical reality.

Few science writers in the decades since have ascended to the top of the hierarchy of explanation, elucidation, and enchantment, which Carson crowned. Among them was the great physician, etymologist, poet, and essayist Lewis Thomas (November 25, 1913–December 3, 1993), who explores that delicate relationship between humanity and the rest of nature in a splendid essay titled “Seven Wonders,” found in his timelessly rewarding 1983 collection Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (public library).

Lewis Thomas (Photograph: NYU archives)

With an eye to the consciousness-reconfiguring cosmic perspective which twentieth-century space exploration unlatched, Thomas writes:

We named the place we live in the world long ago, from the Indo-European root wiros, which meant man. We now live in the whole universe, that stupefying piece of expanding geometry. Our suburbs are the local solar system, into which, sooner or later, we will spread life, and then, likely, beyond into the galaxy. Of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far as we can see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvelous and mysterious is turning out to be our own planet earth. There is nothing to match it anywhere, not yet anyway.

Illustration by Oliver Jeffers from Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth

Building on Carson’s far-reaching ecological legacy, Thomas adds:

[Earth] is a living system, an immense organism, still developing, regulating itself, making its own oxygen, maintaining its own temperature, keeping all its infinite living parts connected and interdependent, including us. It is the strangest of all places, and there is everything in the world to learn about it. It can keep us awake and jubilant with questions for millennia ahead, if we can learn not to meddle and not to destroy. Our great hope is in being such a young species, thinking in language only a short while, still learning, still growing up.

We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let’s give it a try. We are in for one surprise after another if we keep at it and keep alive. We can build structures for human society never seen before, thoughts never thought before, music never heard before.

In a lovely counterpoint to today’s fashionably glib view of our potential and our shared future, Thomas echoes John Cage’s insistence that “it is essential that we be convinced of the goodness of human nature” and concludes:

Provided we do not kill ourselves off, and provided we can connect ourselves by the affection and respect for which I believe our genes are also coded, there is no end to what we might do on or off this planet.

At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.

Illustration from Beastly Verse by JooHee Yoon

Complement this particular portion of Thomas’s wholly magnificent Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with Rachel Carson’s courageous letter of dissent against the destruction of nature and Henry Beston — who influenced Carson — on relearning to be nurtured by nature and how our relationship to the Earth reveals us to ourselves, then revisit Lewis Thomas on how we grow from ignorance to knowledge.

“WE KNOW THIS IS TEMPORARY, BUT IT DOESN’T FEEL THAT WAY, AND WE REALIZE THINGS WILL BE DIFFERENT.”

BY VICTOR TANGERMANN / March 25, 2020 (futurism.com)

IT’S A SUNNY DAY OUTSIDE. I look out the window. The way the yard behind my apartment looks — peaceful, quiet — almost makes it seem like it’s just another Wednesday morning. But it’s not. There’s a lump in my throat. It’s not a fever, or a cough. It’s something I just can’t put my finger on. It’s not anxiety; it’s something more pervasive.

The coronavirus pandemic has invaded almost every aspect of our lives, from the way we work, to the way we interact with strangers on sidewalks. The fact that nobody has any answers doesn’t help. Nobody knows how long this will last. Nobody knows if their loved ones will be safe. Nobody knows if their job is safe.

It’s a pervasive feeling, it won’t go away, and — even as someone paid to write every day — it’s impossible to characterize with words, despite my best efforts.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t try. In an excellent, must-read interview with the Harvard Business Review, author and leading expert on grief David Kessler argues that what we’re collectively feeling is grief. And not just one kind of grief.

Kessler’s description of that unnerving feeling hits close to home — and might just help you cope just a little bit better with a very shitty situation.

“We feel the world has changed, and it has,” Kessler told HBR. “We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed.”

And we’re not alone in that. “The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection,” he added, “is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.”

One kind of grief we’re feeling he characterizes as “anticipatory grief,” according to Kessler, as in, when someone tests positive, or even, the concern that they will, and that their outcome may be dire. One word for that anticipatory grief is “unhealthy.” And another, he points out, is “anxiety,” physical pain that can manifest itself through grief:

“Our mind begins to show us images. […] Our goal is not to ignore those images or to try to make them go away — your mind won’t let you do that and it can be painful to try and force it. The goal is to find balance in the things you’re thinking.”

The fact that the enemy’s invisible is not helping, either, he explains, and it breaks our sense of safety.

So how do we move on? How do we process this collective grief? Rather than rattling off the stages of grief — you might be familiar with them already — Kessler suggests it’s not something that’s linear. Denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance don’t just hit you one-by-one.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do to process this unnerving feeling. “To calm yourself, you want to come into the present,” Kessler advised. “This will be familiar advice to anyone who has meditated or practiced mindfulness but people are always surprised at how prosaic this can be.”

You should also let go of what you can’t control. “What your neighbor is doing is out of your control. What is in your control is staying six feet away from them and washing your hands. Focus on that.” He also urges focusing on emotions you can control, like patience, with other people as stressed as you are. Or doing that which is within your control: Talking to people. Naming your emotions. It gives you, according to Kessler, a therapeutic sense of recognition and release:

And if it all feels like too much, talk it out. “When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you,” says Kessler. “Emotions need motion.”

” If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us,” concludes Kessler. “Then we’re not victims.”

If you have the misconception that your life will be perfect, you will always be shocked by its up and down nature. If you expect your life to be up and down, your mind will be much more peaceful.    –Lama Yeshe, Make Your Mind An Ocean (Contributed by Sue Beck, H.W., M.)