It's Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature! — Exit Strategy for Dying

…..was the tag line from a truly bad TV commercial (ironically pitching a margarine product) that aired in 1977.

As unremarkable as the ad was, that line has been indelibly imprinted upon me since. It was a revelatory moment. It hit me square in the face. The power of Nature is omnipotent and omnipresent. In 30 seconds (albeit with repetition as I watched a lot of TV) it focused me on the veracity of those 7 words.

We are not separate from Nature, nor do we control her, we are honestly at her mercy. “It’s Not Nice to Fool Mother Nature” also implied there were consequences if we did not respect her authority.

In a recent NY Times opinion piece about COVID-19, Mother Nature says you need to get back in balance… Thomas Friedman wrote “Mother Nature can inflict her virus on your grandmother on Monday and blow down your house with a tornado on Wednesday and come back on Friday and flood your basement”*

Mother Nature doesn’t cajole us to make change, she forces us into it at times without a choice.

She is the great equalizer.

“Let’s remember, Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics, and the engine that drives her is one thing: natural selection…

All that registers, all that she rewards is.…adaptation.” *

In fact, she demands we adapt. We have to know how to navigate change if we are to survive any given twist in the road she throws at us.

When the pandemic began all those days/weeks/months ago, Mother Nature spoke to us loud and clear. She grounded us, and unceremoniously sent us, her disobedient children, to our rooms to ponder how to adapt to this life-defining crisis we had no preparation for.

In the first weeks of destabilization, when we first sequestered away in our caves, there was immediately a lot of discussion in the news about how interconnected everything and everyone is. While we were busy falling apart; trying to figure out how to survive without the glue of our normal routine, or shut down by fear of the virus, or riddled with anxiety or grief, Mother Nature was also whispering sotto voce in our ears. She was rekindling a long-forgotten ancient memory for us. Having our freedom curtailed, we clearly experienced how truly intertwined all is in our world. It provided a much-needed sense of comfort to know we were bound in this story together, even if we couldn’t be together in the flesh. We started to rejoice in our interdependence because we felt less afraid when we did. It showed us too, just how privileged we had been, slumbering under the illusion of control.

“In the Sixth Great Extinction, the balance of nature has been disturbed, and the suffering of humans and other animals has increased. COVID-19 is many things, but it is also a reason to reckon with the enormous impact that something damaging the natural world can have on us as individuals.”**

A voice of great reason and compassion, Jane Goodall summed it up simply for us. Mother Nature has forced our faces against the glass of self-awareness. She orchestrated an “intervention” because she is running out of patience, and we are running out of time.

When Mother Nature demands a change we may struggle attempting to adapt, but if we heed her call and survive, she may also bestow gifts upon us. Without the crush of human impact overwhelming the earth there were more birds flying, fish swimming, and animals reclaiming their habitats. We were awed by how we started to feel, humbled by the beauty of all that, even under horrific circumstances. We’ve all traversed heretofore unknown emotional extremes during these months, and in doing so, we have come to witness a more authentic part of ourselves in the process. Eating humble pie can actually be satiating if you are hungry. The hunger (we didn’t even know we had) came calling for us. When Mother Nature smacked us, she gave us a potentially life-transforming push at the same time.

We are in the midst of a collective awakening of the most important sort. We feel ourselves, perhaps for the first time, hanging within the continuum that our lives are simply an infinitesimal fraction of. We see up close and personal that our individual choices and actions have deep consequences. COVID-19 has proven to us, without a doubt, that our impact on one another and on the rest of the planet is real and can be profound.

“Until we truly recognize and embody our interdependence, none of us are free from a broken paradigm. With people standing together around the world, catalytic momentum is building. It is time that we realize our liberation is bound together so we can truly heal as a nation, and as a human family” ***

Humans rise to the best we can be when we have a common goal, or fight the same enemy. COVID-19 has pushed us to define who we really are.

One of the greatest losses we have all suffered under the reign of COVID-19 is to not experience physical touch. To be held back from a hug or kiss with someone we love, or to just be close enough to take in their scent is a quiet grief that has rendered us vulnerable in ways mostly unknown to us before this time. We now know the simple aspects of “normal” life we have taken for granted.

There is a direct line between our awakening to a new construct of our world and the protest movements galvanizing people all over the planet. Through her dominance, Mother Nature pushed back the veil on the illusion of our control. We stood humbled, and in the aftermath, each of us learned what mourning felt like. We have all retained a more intimate sense of what personal loss feels like because of living through this time. Loss and grief can create suffering, but they also hold the transformative elements of consciousness-raising. If our suffering holds meaning for us, we grow exponentially from the grief we have endured. Like the phoenix, our authentic self can rise from the ashes of the pain.

Awakening from a long Rip Van Winkle-like sleep, suddenly the world looks different to us. We can see, feel, hear, touch and taste the pain of others in a way that is far greater, and far more empathetic than before we entered this planetary crisis.

When we are pushed past our known limits, we are more likely to embrace our inner truth, even if out of desperation. Like the character Howard Beale in the brilliant 1976 film Network, this epiphany has driven us to engage with our collective outrage and ban together shouting “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore”.

Mother Nature has demanded solidarity from us in order to survive her wrath, and it is having a seismic ripple effect in our behavior. COVID-19 has pushed us to define who we really are. We’ve experienced universally how we are actually woven together in an intricate web of life. When we join with something greater than only ourselves, it frees us from the myopia of our ego-constructed mind. We have been united by strife, and that unification has given rise to acknowledging greater meaning within our lives.

Soon we will have a conscious choice about retaining the essence of what Mother Nature has revealed to us.

This is our wake up call. Do not go back to sleep.

Mother Nature might be much happier with us too….

Fundamentally human beings are the same. Imagine being lost in some remote place and suddenly seeing someone coming towards you over the horizon. You wouldn't care about their race, nationality or religious faith, you'd be filled with the joy of encountering another human being.
— Dalai Lama (@DalaiLama) June 15, 2020