Rebirth and Rumi in the Time of the Coronavirus

Rumi, the 13th-century poet, Muslim mystic, Sufi.

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.

I'll meet you there."

"When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.” 

"The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

Rumi takes me back to the
Whirling Dervishes, in Istanbul, 2011

For some reason, I often think of Rumi when spring is in the air after a long winter. Swollen buds on trees and bushes are about to burst. Tulips and daffodils push through the soil, little sprigs of  bright green bring hope. It's rebirth. It's breathtaking. The cold is holding back the flowering this year, but the light is forcing the blooms.  

It's the Time of the Coronavirus. A deadly global pandemic. We're isolating, trying to "flatten the curve," lessen the galloping outbreaks of Covid19 ravaging communities across every state. It's the season of rebirth and thousands of people are dying daily, hourly. It's devastating.  Schools are closed, restaurants and businesses, sports events, any events that attract large crowds. Our hospitals are painfully overcrowded. Nurses, doctors and frontline workers are in harms' way, without the protective equipment they need. Not enough masks, ventilators, test kits. 

It's a frightening time, made worse by the criminal negligence of the tRUmp crime enterprise that in 2018 got rid of the infrastructure carefully designed to deal with a pandemic, sat on the truth for too long, lied to the American people.  They are still lying nonstop. At this writing, the oligarchy wants to open everything up to save the economy, which has tanked. Over 33 million people are unemployed. More people will die from the pandemic, but so what. 

This is how the oligarchy is manifesting itself during this crisis. It has politicized a deadly pandemic and is making money off of it. After every briefing the oligarchs have, in secret, since December/early January, the Republicans in the Cabinet, in Congress, in corporations, those billionaires in transnational networks, sell stock, buy stock, get richer. Insider trading. Criminal quid pro quos. So what.  Many of them are running for re-election, like Mitch McConnell and Kathleen Loeffner.  The oligarchs want to keep their power, and their money.  

Here I sit, musing about what's happening, unable to hug my grandkids, to visit friends, to get out and about. I sometimes fume too much about what the tRUmp/McConnell/Barr tyranny is doing to help the rich and hurt the rest of us.They do not care. They simply do not care.

It's a Darwinian world in America these days, survival of the richest. That's why in this season of rebirth, so many are dying. The contradiction, the pain of it, is beyond the pale. 

So I'm watching the buds swell, the tulips opening. The sun is warming up the earth; the days are getting longer. My favorite weeping cherry tree has burst into glorious bloom and a family of cardinals has snuggled in its beauty and built a nest. The father is the brightest red, like some of my tulips. I am watching. I sit on my front porch or my back deck and watch my garden grow. I watch the sunrise and the sunset. Last night I watched a glorious full moon rise, a golden full moon. That's why I am thinking of Rebirth and Rumi in the Time of the Coronavirus.    

* https://www.neh.gov/explore/the-ecstatic-faith-rumi?

* https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/meet-the-economist-behind-the-one-percents-stealth-takeover-of-america?  This excellent article reviews a new book by Duke Historian Nancy MacLean, "Democracy in Chains," which reveals the influence of economist James Buchanan and the rise and takeover of our government by the far-right-wing extremist Koch networks to turn our democracy into an Oligarchy of, by, and for the rich. The actions (and lack of actions) and the consequences are manifesting in spades through this pandemic.