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The Coronavirus is Here to Teach Us What We Need to Know
Let it.
In the Hindu tradition, Kali is a formidable goddess. Towering and terrible, she wields a wickedly sharp blade in one hand and dangles the severed head of a man in another. Her necklace, a grisly adornment, sways with more severed heads.
Kali is the goddess of chaos and destruction. She upends the world as we know it and ruthlessly smashes the structures we rely on. Every time you feel lost, unknown to yourself, or like the ground is moving beneath you, that is Kali at work.
COVID-19 is Kali working on a macro scale.
We’re now in a world many of us are ceasing to recognize. We are being turned upside down. And, with infection numbers rising every hour, we’re seeing physical proof of the ways we’re inextricably interconnected as a species.
Our initial response is to hide until it goes away. We look hopefully at pandemic charts and think, this too shall pass. We just need to wait it out.
So we cut off interaction with others, close shop, cancel everything, hunker down, and get all the toilet paper we can before our neighbors snatch it up.
There are monsters under the bed, in the closet, but they can’t get us, we tell ourselves, when we stay here, in the dark, with our eyes closed.
