Only Human
Photo by Sergio Souza
This morning I wake to a storm, the rain falling steady on the rooftop, the thunder rumbling far away enough not to lightning strike fear, but just as I write this, it is closer. We are always “under the weather.” It is a fact we accept, argumentum non disputandum, an act of God according to both preacher and insurance agent. It is physically impossible to defy the weather successfully without losing our best laid plans, the BBQ and the band. Despite our white-knuckled efforts, black ice be damned, we go skating across that yellow line. In the blink of an eye, the wind can take the hat from your head and the rooftop too. We know this especially well right now, in Tennessee, in Arkansas, but it has always been this way.
My grandma loved to warn me about going outside with wet hair, “You’ll catch your death of cold,” she would say. And that is where the act of God converges with free will. God became man and dwelt among them and died of pneumonia after a fierce snowball fight. We are all little gods, bright light within us, longing for something we can’t seem to explain. “I’ll know it when I see it…” But what do we know?
What we don’t know scares us, for even though we are little gods, we are only human after all. Only human means death is the end and that is one thing we seem to have decided upon. Only human means we must take care not to disrupt the intricate stasis of our only human body, but we fumble at the controls of the machine. We cannot defend against what we cannot see… like a microbial invasion, for instance. Crown of all viruses, weak in nature, killed by any household disinfectant, but strong enough to build an army of tiny grim reapers, an army that is bringing the world to its knees. We are hit, we are down, we are down and out.
It is widely believed that the only way to save ourselves is to separate, but this feels oddly like “divide and conquer,” a tried and true war tactic. We were already divided, politically, ideologically, of our own doing and now -- now we are all physically six feet apart and not yet underground, but many of us feel as if we are, all shut up in our houses afraid to go out. And for how long? The clock ticks; the days fall into weeks. Everyone needs a haircut. No one remembers to put pants on. Men who have never cried, now cry themselves to sleep. The whole world in the grip of something we cannot see.
Herein lies the evidence that we are not only human. We have always known the power of what we cannot see. We just forgot to look for it. And now, when we need it the most, we are separate, but what we cannot see is not bound by human laws. What we cannot see travels freely over continents, across borders, into our hearts and then out again to carry our love to one another, love that is stronger than fear and deeper than deep magic before the dawn of time -- love that is more than human, love that spans generations, love that is beyond suffering and even death, love that makes us more than human.
This is our chance for true survival. This is our chance to be who we really are. It will not be easy. We are in the chrysalis. It is a terrifying transformation. But we are not alone in our fear. For once, fear is bringing us together, and we see what we cannot see, the light inside each of us only human little gods.