The Phenomenon of Strangeness

 Being on the subway these days, I feel fear. But, interestingly, it's not so much the fear of the virus (although that's certainly a fear) as it is a pervasive sense of a social structure caving in or at least under tremendous strain. Recently, I have been experiencing the fragility of care; the sense that caring is dependent on the intention and choices of many collectively, and simply cannot be enforced by itself. I believe that when social structures start to unravel through disasters or crises (like the one we are experiencing now), it becomes evident that kindness and care are not automatically mandated things, and they never were. Those things are decisions that come from individuals. When the social fabric crumbles or slows down, it might be more clear how these decisions are made. Kindness becomes very kind and lack of kindness is experienced as an extreme absence---almost a kind of violence.
   There is a quiet everywhere. In the subway stations, many people do act strangely, as though there were an apocalypse, and even sanity is starting to leave the walls of all the institutions. I think that when I am seeing this, it is a reflection not only of me as a perceiver but also the collective karma and its reaction to the pandemic. Sometimes it takes the form of paranoia--maybe putting a little bit too much protection on face and hands??--while other times it takes the form of a kind of giving up and acting out of fantasies that otherwise get suppressed or hidden away.
  I think it's important in these times to remind myself that people are expressing the deepest sorrow of all humanity at this time, and might even be acting out the traumas of the natural world, all of which had been silenced through heavy industrialization. None of this has to do with the people themselves as individuals, and perhaps the virus is only an expression of  a deeper malaise that was always silenced under the constant drone of machinery, productivity, and efficiency. Like wounds that have sat under flimsily held bandages for decades, these festering sores start to hang out under the decaying seams. I find it interesting to see how this unfolds and what it means, but I would suggest not to take any of this personally, but to see it as a collective karma.