The hospital where I work allowed us, starting yesterday, to be completely mask-free with exceptions for when we have an upper respiratory illness. The amount of people still wearing masks on Monday surprised me somewhat (a subject for a later post), but for my part, I looked and smiled at as many people as possible. The following is what I wrote in response to some of the first months of the COVID pandemic and what COVID could teach us about our interconnectedness. The writing could definitely be cleaned up, but the goal is to post daily for Lent. ;)
EXPOSURE
It’s what causes a virus to leave you and enter me. It’s what brings me closer to you as I show you the tender places of my heart, my body – the revelation of scars and hurts that then call to those same places in you. It’s what leads to sunburn, frostbite – or what can lead to justice and the righting of wrongs.
The exposure of COVID has done all of this and more. It has entered us all from ground zero – traveling the world in some interconnected web that maybe we had all forgotten. It has exposed us to our vulnerabilities, our weakness, our prejudices, our systemic injustices, and it has brought us together even as it has isolated and separated us.
We have found that we need more connection than what we’ve admitted to ourselves and that we MUST indeed HAVE to be for more than just ourselves or those closest to us. We MUST be for everyone and HAVE to consider our actions in light of everyone if we are to survive.
Yes, the ground has been ripped away – the masks of our own independence - and exposed are all the ways we are interdependent on one another. The way our very breath can change the functioning of the entire globe. How one invisible force can wreak havoc on all things visible. . .
And if that nanometer of invisibility can change the world – you can change the world, I can change the world. We can take this connection and face down what stands to destroy one of us or all of us – because now we know – now we have been exposed –
My connection, your connection is to everyone.
