I turned on the trial of the murder of George Floyd just as medical expert Dr. Martin Tobin was testifying.

Two consecutive frames of the video were playing over and over, showing the exact moment that George Floyd died on the pavement in Minneapolis.

Life Goes Out

With the camera zoomed in on Mr. Floyd’s eyes Dr. Tobin made his point: “One second he’s alive, and the next second he isn’t,” Tobin said. “This is the moment life goes out of the body.”

The scene was, of course, disturbing to watch. The senselessness of the loss made the death even more troubling.

The death of George Floyd forced us to take a good, hard, intimate look at the society we have created, without sugar-coating or pretending, the dark underbelly exposed for the world to see.

Our society is built on a series of grave missteps which offered us short-term gain – slavery, genocide of native people, extermination of native 4-leggeds like wolves.

We didn’t stop to consider that there might be long term consequences to these acts which were neither sustainable nor just. The karmic debt for these atrocities is coming due.

How Do We Fix It?

How do we humans break out of our trance and evolve? How do we learn to remember the sacredness of this incarnation and how interconnected all of life is? How do we muster up the courage to take on any one of the many injustices we see every day so that we can be a part of the solution?

The greatest danger to our future is apathy. ~Jane Goodall

The magnitude of the problems can seem so immense that it can be tempting to tune out and just enjoy whatever privilege we have for as long as we can. Wait for somebody else to fix the problems. Unfortunately, as has been prophecized by the Hopi, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for. It’s up to us.

What is mine to do?

This is a question I ask myself often. We can’t do everything but there’s almost always something we can do.

After watching the George Floyd trial, I finished my workday and laced up my running shoes. If there is something that reliably clears my head, it is a brisk run in nature.

I headed for one of my favorite spots a few miles away: a trail through the woods that runs between a river and a pond. It’s is beautiful, fragrant, quiet, filled with a diversity of wildlife. Medicine for my soul.

“Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.”– Albert Einstein

As I ran deeper into the refuge I approached a small bridge over the river. Underneath the bridge was a ramp made of rocks and concrete, a man-made structure meant to be a barrier between the pond and the stream.

As I approached I sensed some unusual activity and saw that there were dozens of fish at the base of the dam trying desperately to get upstream. The water was roiling with activity.

Some were floating dead on top of the water-they had given it their all but just couldn’t make it.  They died just a few feet shy of their goal, the steepness of the concrete making it a herculean task for their tiny bodies.

Some of the fish were bleeding, throwing themselves up and over the rocks again and again.

I am not a fish expert but I know desperation when I feel and see it.

Some important, ancient messenger still very much alive in their DNA was urging them on, the message clear and unequivocal.

They were trying to obey as if their lives depended on it. The sense of death rattled my nervous system.

There were a few who were stuck on top of rocks, flapping around helplessly, trying to find their way back into the water. I found a stick and gently got them back into the water.

“Nothing ever exists entirely alone; everything is in relation to everything else.” ~Buddha

Once they were safe, I spotted one more fish lying on her side on a rock sticking out of the water. She had almost made it! She had a bloody wound on her side and looked exhausted but my eye caught hers and I felt it so clearly:

Life Wants to Live

I reached out for her with my stick but I couldn’t quite reach. Perhaps I should have gotten off the bridge to find a longer stick or waded into the water to reach her. But in that moment, when I saw her weak, shallow gasps, I tried to prevent another unnecessary loss.

“The question was not death; living things die.
It was love.
Not that we died, but that we cared wildly, and deeply.” ~Annie Dillard

I reached my arm out a tiny bit farther. The next thing I knew I was falling through the air, landing on the concrete below with an immediate flash of pain which would later prove to be a spiral fracture in my foot.

People have said to me, “It was just a fish, you shouldn’t have done that.”

While there probably was a wiser action to take, I do not regret caring. In the end this wasn’t really about the fish.

Compassion, Empathy and Interconnection

The society to which we belong seems to be dying. Our greed and ignorance are catching up to us. Every day, if we are paying attention, we see the increased violence and division, the results of generations not taught to care for the ‘other.’ Whether the other is a human with a different skin color or gender, or someone who has 4 legs instead of 2, or wings or scales, all beings want to live free from suffering.

In these troubled times, the best thing we can do is to expand the capacity of our own heart and take action in the service of others.

What a great privilege it is to bring some beauty and compassion into our deeply wounded planet. How alive it brings us when we offer kindness to another. We actually get more than we give when we embrace altruism and attend with compassion to all the daily choices.

Fierce Kindness

Sometimes kindness is messy. Sometimes we mess up and hurt another or even ourselves in an attempt to be of service of the greater good.

I want to live in a world where people pay careful attention to the details of others’ experiences; where people not only see the suffering of another (watch the eyes!) but who care enough to do something about it, who are willing to make a sacrifice.

If you want a love message to be heard,
it has got to be sent out.
To keep a lamp burning,
we have to keep putting oil in it.
– Mother Teresa

My incident on the bridge was a ‘love message’; it was me putting oil in the lamp. It was not my most skillful attempt, but life is not perfect and I would rather err in burning too brightly than in fizzling out and fading away, too lost in my own mental drama to offer assistance to another in need.

What if the opposite of love is not hate but apathy?

How alive are you willing to be? How big can your heart get?

Compassion is meaningless as an abstraction. Love is worthless if only on the page. It’s what we do that counts, nudged forward by our highest intentions.

We won’t get there by avoiding rage and grief, by simply blaming others for their craziness or by doubling down on our biases.

We touch divinity and bring hope into the world by continually honing in on the universal truths, and then acting towards making that truth come alive through our physical forms.

To give pleasure to a single heart by a single act
is better than a thousand heads bowing in prayer.
– Mahatma Gandhi

As we enter into the post-pandemic world we will have to decide what the new normal will look like.

What if we all showed up looking out for each other, deliberately trying to be of assistance whenever possible, being a bit more fierce with our compassion?

I know many people are still exhausted and frazzled because of all the uncertainty of the past year. We have all endured collective trauma, and for many people that is layered onto personal trauma.

Let’s care for each other a bit more tenderly. Let’s stay awake and attuned to the suffering of others.

If you continually ask what is yours to do, and then take action when you get the nudges, you will be a carrier of light in these dark times.

“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.” – Anne Frank

Let’s be creatively defiant with our light as we define what this next chapter looks like.  I’ll see you on the path.

With many blessings to you and yours,