#12. What guidance is being offered to us by the Coronavirus about how to live as Gaians?

The little RNA packet of Coronavirus comes with a critical message for us: we are integral members of the Gaian community, and with Gaia we sink or swim. 

To our capitalist economic system, which has been running most human beings and all non-human beings ragged, Coronavirus raps out a forceful, inescapable directive: STOP. 

Stop the fast-flying, hard-driving, super-destructive lifestyle of industrial civilization. Stop the planes and cars, the production of trinkets and baubles, industrial agriculture, the endless maws of the pulp factories and the pumping of fossil fuels. 

To each of us as individual Coronavirus says sternly: Stop running the rat race of school and jobs. Slow down, breathe and remember who you are and what’s truly important to you. 

In my life I have often gotten sick (with a cold or flu) when I am tired and harried and need to take it easy. My body will only take so much of being driven forward before it rebels, accepts a virus, and forces me to stay in bed for a few days.

That’s what is happening now, on a global scale. Coronavirus is forcing us all to slow down, maybe even to stop. 

In this great, worldwide slowdown there is an opportunity to deeply reassess how we have been living—individually and as communities, as countries and as a global human society. 

There is an opportunity to recognize the interconnectedness of the Gaian system; to make new personal, political and planetary choices according to our growing awareness that our own health and well-being depends on the health and well-being of the entire system

Your body is a microcosm of the planetary body. We are all made from the same stardust, animated by the same cosmic energy. The Coronavirus is another form of that same animated matter, with an operating system that impels it to exuberant life and reproduction. In its whirling dance from person to person it taps out a clear message for us, its unwilling hosts: slow down, take care, or return to the matrix to be born anew. 

Today, as I slow down and ponder, I cannot offer answers, only more questions. 

• How can we put the guidance of the Coronavirus—to slow down and take care—into practice through social policies and institutions? 

• How can we transform education, work, human relations and Gaian relations to reflect the wisdom of the Coronavirus? 

Your thoughts most cordially welcome and most urgently needed.