Being human

If there is one phrase I loathe about the moment, other than ‘social dancing’ and ‘stay safe’, is ‘catch it, bin it, kill it’.

I was saddened to see that the primary school that Elijah usually attends, but is not attending at the moment (and thank goodness he isn’t, seeing what going back to school now entails, not the teachers fault by the way, public health gone mad it seems) will reinforce the ‘catch it, bin it, kill it’ message regularly. I suspect they have been instructed to do so by public health.

But is this really a phrase we want reinforced in our children. Yes it might be related to the virus, but isn’t it indicative of where we have strayed as a humanity, where we feel we have to be killing all the time. Look where that’s gotten the US with their emphasis on guns and the killing culture - ‘but I need it for self defence’. What are we so scared of all the time, that we have to kill, a fly, a mouse, a virus? What’s the difference, really, because it’s all life.

We have learned to live with flies yet they can harm us, infect us with malaria, transfer their eggs to the food we might eat, just be a really annoying nuisance, and yet does that give us a right to kill them? A mouse in our house, it happened to us just before lockdown and there we were not sure to do, initially there was the notion that we might set traps, but that seemed just too cruel, so E caught them as humanly as he could and released into the back of the garden, set free, no killing necessary, and no longer a nuisance to us either.

‘Humanly’ means with human feeling or kindness. I ask myself how humanly we are currently living. I ranted yesterday and thought that might clear it a little, but today the same old stuff just comes up again. We need to move on from this old paradigm of always thinking that something is harming or hurting us, and rather than trying to find a way to live humanly with whatever it is, we have to eradicate it, get rid of it, exterminate it.

Public Health need to really think about the messages they are conveying to the wider public. Those in power, need to really think about the wider implications of the decisions they are making, and the reason they are making them, and is it from a place of fear or from a place of love, are these humane decisions. And we the general public, we do have our own power, we can make a stand, we can opt out, we can find another way, if there are enough of us who question these decisions being made. We do not need to follow like sheep, asleep.

My Mum was always keen that I was never a sheep. She has lived to regret that decision many times over as he has watched me drop further away from what others are doing. Where once I was frustrated about her attitude because I wanted to wear the same dress as the other girls in my class at primary school, but was not allowed to do so, because she didn’t want me being a sheep, I am grateful to her now for this.

To have your own mind is not necessarily easy, because there is a responsibility, and there is of course still a fear of getting it very wrong, and yet there is such freedom because the choices are your own, not someone else’s, not because you have been told ‘this is the way’ and you have blindly followed, but because you are conscious of the reason that you are doing what you are doing. And you are more than happy to admit when you don’t know and that you might have got it wrong.

I truly feel we need to change the story now. Let it go. Of the victimhood and the harm done, of the way that we have killed aspects of ourselves, and bring those aspects back to life again, reclaim the power that we might have been giving away our whole lifetimes, because we never questioned, we never hesitated, we never thought, hmm, but is there another way, can we live more harmoniously, more humanly, within ourselves, within our own true nature, our own flesh and bones, and the nature of the wider world in which we feel ourselves at home, with the divine, with heart and with soul.

I am reminded of this poem from Hafiz:

“Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about 'His great visions of God,' he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying 'Are these wondrous dreams true?'

I replied, 'How many goats do you have?'

He looked surprised and said, 'I am speaking of sublime visions and you ask about goats?'

And I spoke again, saying, 'Yes brother -- how many do you have?'

'Well, Hafiz, I have sixty two.'

'And how many wives?' 

Again he looked surprised, then said, 'Four.'

'How many rose bushes in your garden? How many children? Are your parents still alive? Do you feed the birds in winter?'

And to all he answered.

Then I said, 'You asked me if I thought your visions were true. I would say that they were if they made you become more human, more kind to every creature and plant that you know.'"

Love Emma x