Dear Friends: In March, when the 2020 Pacific Northwest Quaker Women's Theology Conference was postponed, the planning committee was originally going to ask the plenary speakers, of whom I was one, to write something about how the topic of their plenary related to the COVID-19 pandemic. I'd been nearly constantly thinking about that –Earthcare in a time of COVID-19 – anyway.
As I've continued ruminating on that, I realized my thoughts connected well with the theme of this issue of Western Friend, "On Wealth."
It begins with some of my hopefulness during this time. Certainly there's a lot of suffering for a lot of people, and I don't want to trivialize that at all; it has been and continues to be profoundly difficult for so many. There's a lot of grief and a lot of anxiety, and a lot of death in human communities on every continent (but Antarctica). And at the same time, as we are forced to disconnect from our "normal lives," I think many of us are experiencing a simpler way of living – slowing down and shifting our attention. We're shifting from our rushing about, working, shopping, busy-ness, and our interactions with humans, which are constricted at this time for most of us, to our relationship with the rest of our fellow more-than-humans. We're noticing the buds and the bird songs of spring, the morning dew, the mist over the water. . .
And if we're paying attention, we may realize that we're capable of far greater (and sudden) changes in our behavior than we might have previously believed possible – changes essential to preserve human life, which, as it turns out, have also been having a positive impact on many of our fellow species.
Perhaps we are also reconsidering our priorities and our pastimes. – What brings us joy? What gets in the way of that? Where does our wealth lie?
And it's my hope that we will come again to experience the depth of our dependence on the entirety of the circle of life – for our joy, for our sense of well-being, for our sense of belonging to the greater community, and of course, for our very existence.
And it's my hope that this will cause a subtle but profound shift, which I hope will be lasting, in our priorities, in our understanding of our place in the universe, and thereby in our behavior. When we recognize that the health of the human is integrally connected to the health of Earth, and the thriving of the human is integrally connected and interdependent with the thriving of Earth, we will know that there can't be healthy people on a sick planet. We can begin to act knowing of and celebrating our profound kinship with all life on our Earth home; we can establish a basis for a flourishing Earth community.
– Mary Ann Percy, Bellingham Friends Meeting