Photo taken during Spanish flu; photographer unknown.
Close to Nowhere
William Butler Yeats wrote in his poem "The Second Coming:
"And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches toward Bethlehem..."
If this pandemic is not a rough beast, I don't know what is.
I sit in my house, self-quarantined, and watch the entire world in a panic me and the world.
And then I read this poem on Facebook, and I realized, there is nothing new under the sun. The world made it through the Spanish flu and the 1918 pandemic that ended World War I.
Surely, we can too... The poem below was written in 1869 by Kathleen O'Meara, during the Spanish flu. It was reprinted during 1918 pandemic that ended World War I.
"And people stayed home
and read books and listened
and rested and exercised
and made art and played
and learned new ways of being
and stopped
and listened deeper
someone meditated
someone prayed
someone danced
someone met their shadow
and people began to think differently
and people healed
and in the absence of people who lived in ignorant ways,
dangerous, meaningless and heartless,
even the earth began to heal
and when the danger ended
and people found each other
grieved for the dead people
and they made new choices
and dreamed of new visions
and created new ways of life
and healed the earth completely
just as they were healed themselves."