In the U.S., we are in the middle of a first: A unifying threat, an upending event that affects everyone equally – rich, poor, politician, citizen – and also connects us to the rest of the world. As Americans, we are used to seeing large scale disasters on television, or hearing about them on the radio. Though we have become accustomed to seeing the horror of mass shootings within our borders, still, for most of us those events are far – off, or at least once – removed. And now we know for ourselves a visceral, unifying vulnerability.

I know in the early days of realizing the coronavirus would reach every state in America, I found myself googling “average age of person who dies from coronavirus” and, “how is coronavirus transmitted.” I felt a lot of fear, and worried for my family, imagining losing people I love.

The fear was confusing, as I received my daily emails from the New York Times. I began to realize that everyone – scientists, journalists, politicians, and citizens – were trying to assimilate all the available information into something that was continually elusive: certainty. As I stared at all the data – the graphs, the charts, the maps – I would feel the ground shifting underneath me, not just from worry, but from disorientation. Then I would talk to friends who believed it was all made up, “It’s just like the flu,” they would say, and something in my body would shrink from that, too.

I began to realize what I have realized again and again in life: No one knows much of anything at all with complete certainty. And in certainty, the truth of Not Knowing becomes like a balm to heal the disorientation that goes along with believing something that may or may not be true. In knowing that I had to find a way to some deeper truth about what I was experiencing and how to live in this new reality day to day, I began to look more deeply at what was in front of me.

The search for some ultimate understand is most often undertaken through the acquisition of information. We figure, the more information we can assimilate, the closer to the truth we will get. And yet, as we assimilate more and more information, our anxiety may grow as we realize that the information isn’t really helping us. We still don’t know the answers to our most basic questions: What will happen to us? What will tomorrow bring? Are we okay? Is all this okay? What are the right choices? It comes down to the reality at hand, or what is actually happening in this moment in front of us. That is ultimately how we make choices, and how we find understanding, and peace. Don’t get me wrong, information is important, it serves a vital purpose. It helps to guide and shape our wisdom and our actions. However, when it is elevated to a status above the experience of life itself, it has the quality of imbalance. When we take it in without losing sight of the truth of our experience of life now, it can serve a great purpose.

If I look out of these eyes into the world in front of me, the coronavirus is just a word. What is actually happening is that people are getting sick, and some people are dying. And also, the sun is coming up, and going down, Spring is here in full bloom where I live and the birds, oblivious to the human mind as they are, sing into the warming air with abandon as they always have. My legs work so I take walks, and my mind is intact so I have conversations. I feel love, and peace and fear and anger and more. And I am aware of a heaviness in the air, of a lack of movement outside, of the human world in a pause, a pregnant pause filled with a question mark. I am aware that a new virus has made some people ill. Sickness in my world is always an expression of imbalance. Imbalance has nothing to do with blame, it is only the way we get lost from our own center, our own congruency, and how we return to ourselves with deep reverence and love. Physical pain opens our hearts to ourselves and others, whether we want it to or not. It breaks through our mundane and innocent attachments – to body, to life, to freedom – and returns us to our heart where we find solace when we are denied comfort. Sometimes this return results in physical healing and sometimes not. Sometimes it results in ongoing physical illness, yet a deeper, soul-healing. Sometimes, this journey of coming home to balance, to ourselves, results in death. Death is not a failure, it is a release, a finishing, a completion, and a deeply sacred one.

As a hospice chaplain, when I was with a dying person, it was not their disease that was present, it was their spirit, and their death. The disease was just what got them there. Their death was beautiful, was sacred, and holy. Their disease was a passing dream they left behind. And even if they died from the same disease as thousands or millions of others, their death was their own – a beautiful expression of the flowering of their life. Death is something I have a deep respect for. It takes us with great mercy from our suffering. It pulls us into presence, into our deepest chambers of love and awareness. Though it can bring up our fears as well, it ultimately, like birth, swallows us into surrender – the place we always wanted to go but didn’t know how.

In David Abram’s book, The Spell of the Sensuous, he talked about how the shaman traditionally lived outside of the village, so that they could observe the patterns of the village and nature, and understand them from a panoramic view. If there was an illness that swept the village, they would see the larger picture of imbalance, of how the villagers were interacting with nature and how nature was interacting with them. Now, we are all shamans, sitting on a private hilltop, separated out. Can we look, and can we see? I don’t know what we will find, each of us with our own form of wisdom. If we are quiet, perhaps we will see something about how healing can occur, not just from the virus, but from that which makes us feel sick, afraid, and alienated. Sensing and feeling what is incongruent is a practice that brings us in contact with our deepest and truest movement. We get to attune to our own being, and what it speaks to us when we have stopped telling it what it should say. And this movement, our natural movement toward balance, is not separate from our world.

For me, the reality of death is encouraging. It blames no one, and comes for us all. I welcome it in my world not because I am suicidal, but because it is already here, it is already our destiny. If this is accepted, then the coronavirus can become something else. It can cease to be an attacker, with us as the victims. It can become a messenger, a symbol, an expression of this moment in time. An expression of our lives, our community, our world. If we see death as a larger saga of tragedy, we lose our connection to its magic, and we become victims in a world that appears dark and without meaning.

And in this time of trying to gain certainty, perhaps it is more useful to see the facts as they are: People are getting sick, and some people are dying. When we look at this, we can perhaps see each individual death as sacred, and having little or nothing to do with a coronavirus. We each have our time to live, and our time to die. It matters little what takes us, when our time comes. When we are intimate with our own death, it most likely won’t be the coronavirus we are thinking of.

Is social distancing what will save us? I imagine it is necessary right now, and that it will help, but ultimately if we do not take in the things that are imbalanced and incongruent in our world and within ourselves, there will continue to be things that we experience as threats. When we are in balance, then illness is not separate from us. We see it as a natural expression of life. When we are out of balance, its purpose is to wake us up, to shake us from our slumber, to remind us of the enormity of our world, and our small, yet sacred and significant place in it. It equalizes us, and this can be terrifying, or beautiful. If we have everything in common, then how are we making ourselves separate? What is this virus waking us up out of personally? What is it waking us up out of collectively? I don’t know, but I am sitting with openness to receive the seeing that comes from this quiet.

As we all do our part to keep people safe and cared for, may we all awaken together from our places of not-seeing. May we let this pain, suffering, grief, and confusion take us into our inner chambers, where we are freed from petty-ness, freed to see what is actually in front of us. Information is good sometimes, but often obscures the truth that sits just where we are. What is actually here? Let’s investigate together.