This time of quarantine has provided a powerful space for inner reckoning. I don’t know about you, but for me this has been a deeply stilling, provocative and annihilating time.

Most moments, I find myself surprisingly speechless. Less words, more presence, less complexity, more mundane simplicity, less striving, more wondering, more knowing and unknowing, more human, more unchanging ground of being.

It feels like we are in a hot fire—globally, collectively, communally, personally. And how we each make use of this fire, alone and together, will determine much of what is to follow.

It’s a fire of holy not knowing. The holy shitness of “I really don’t know.”

Will it get worse before it gets better? We don’t know. Will this virus come knocking at our door? We don’t know. Will our children ever go back to school and sit side-by-side their classmates again? We just don’t know. What will become of our cultural and global economy? Our livelihoods? Our democracy? We don’t know, we don’t know.

It’s a tremendous emptying; a leaning into Zero.

What’s asking to be surrendered—at the largest levels, and also at the most intimate, internal, personal levels of our being?

What am I willing to put in the fire? What are you willing to put in the fire? What is our culture willing to put in the fire in service of the whole? What are the world’s wealthiest and most privileged communities willing to put in the fire?

What battles, wars, lies, betrayals, addictions, dichotomizations and polarizations, self-righteous opinions and stances, are we willing to lay down, in honor of LIFE and truth and love and freedom?

What truly brings our lives meaning? What soothes us when we can’t reach for familiar comforts or busyness or assurances of relative security? What brings us any sense of real connection, community and belonging?

We are being asked to face our collective dysfunction, our addictive strategies for avoidance, for going to sleep on the essential, and our relentless agendas for personal comfort, success, importance, image and worth-fulness …

We are being asked to consider if we are willing to let go of the way things have been. Including the things we really enjoy and appreciate as bi-products of our collective dysfunction and addiction.

Adjustment is not often comfortable. I’m recalling all the chiropractic adjustments I’ve ever received, and how usually afterwards, when I’m finally apparently “aligned”, it hurts and sometimes gives me a headache, and causes my body to detox. Realignment can be extremely uncomfortable at first.

These times are asking me to sit and face myself and get very honest about what’s running underneath the surface appearances of my life. I’m being asked to consider what it is I want most of all (at all the levels—personal, familial, communal, collective, cultural, global) and what I’m willing to give and surrender for that to be so.

I sense I’m being schooled in a particular way on the purity of truth. As someone who has long considered myself a writer, a teacher, a healer, I’m reveling in the reality of how unnecessary it is to teach a thing, to give a thing, to impart or transmit another thing…. ZERO.

At the same time, I’m listening closely to what’s really being asked of me and asked of all of us…What IS necessary at this time? What IS my piece to say?  What’s the best use of my voice, my hands, my intelligence, my consciousness, my heart? What’s the best use of my one precious and fleeting life?

Every moment we have a choice of how to respond to what’s here. Every moment we are free to choose what we touch with our attention. Every moment we are free to choose what we give our mind and our heart’s presence to. With our choices we literally create our world. This is such a power. May we use it wisely!

I love you.  ~*~ J