Earth Day in a Grey, Dormant City

This week was the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.

It was planned to be the largest global strike the world has seen, a mass gathering to demand a Green New Deal. Instead, in an inverted mass movement, thousands stayed home, apart, in unison.

Participants not choosing to stand for their convictions, but chosen by a virus touching lives as indiscriminately as unfettered climate change would. Our inability to choose to gather foreshadowing our inability to choose where to go should our planet reach tipping points, cascading changes, of no return.

Because I am haunted by these cascading changes, I’m not sad that we couldn’t protest. I am sad for the true losses and hardships of this time: the very real and immeasurable human and economic and psychological tolls.

But I don’t miss day-to-day life. I don’t mourn benign moments deciding what to buy to eat, commuting, catching slices of sky between skyscrapers, gathering with strangers.

I don’t feel that I lost anything, because the threatening cascades churned constantly beneath the thrum of daily life. So daily life never felt like mine — just borrowed from an unrecognizable future. Each purchase, each day exhausted checking off to-dos, bringing us a collective, mindless step closer to the fall.

Sometimes the grey, geometric city feels like dead matter. Moving on autopilot, going about the motions of life — cars driving, subways running, people coming and going to and from work, because that’s just what’s done. Over the hum of the city, my relentless appetite for connection, for calm, for happiness, hums inside me all day. I long and ache and yearn for so much.

The quarantine is an unprecedented invitation to be still. To hunker down, turn inward. Reconnect with the deep self. Listen to the voices and desires inside. They are soft suggestions that can be stifled by distractions or grow louder if you tune in. Frequencies to the soul. I want, I want, I want. These days, my soul frequencies feel stronger.

For this reason, I don’t want things to go back to normal. I’ve had all day every day to be with the closest ones I love, and it’s still not enough. All day every day to be filled with myself, and I can still be filled more.

This Earth Day, though we could not gather, we still demand a Green New Deal.

I want a Green New Deal not only to ease the loss of lives and the economic costs of COVID-19 and, to come, climate change. I want a Green New Deal for a world that nurtures the magic we find when we listen to ourselves and each other. The voices inside us that say, “it doesn’t have to be this hard.”

We can thrive and have time for our loved ones instead of sacrificing every hour of our lives for the grind. We can be abundant and kind instead of cutthroat. It doesn’t have to be your healthcare or mine; the poor or the rich; our compassion or our wealth. Our animal, child-like needs for comfort and nourishment, or our adult needs to catapult ahead and bloom.

We, like our planet, are fragile and gorgeous. COVID-19 shows us this with cutting, crystalline clarity.

I want a Green New Deal for a society that protects the fragile gorgeousness of being human, and of every human being, with everything it has.

I want a Green New Deal to build a now that is timeless, not borrowed. An outside world that mirrors the inside of who we are.

I want our shared home on this rock shooting through space to be a glittering, gorgeous palace. Our sanctuary of nurturing nourishing connectedness. A fortress of safety and a pleasure play pen.

I just want more. And I know that we can bring more to this life, now and in a limitless future. Beginning with a Green New Deal, we can build a civilization that speaks to the magic of being alive.

We can give each other nourishment, and resilience, and time, as deep and boundless as the Earth.