Social permission to help each other

I woke yesterday at 5:00am California time feeling very uncomfortable. What's going on, I tried to figure out. Pre-earthquake jitters? Oh... then I realized in my groggy anxiety, Katrina is about to hit land.

I turned on the television and saw Katrina's menacing red flames swirling on the radar just off land's edge.

The thought came to me in that state between sleep and wake: Earth looks pretty angry right now.

I acknowledged the anger, since that's what it looked like. God knows, Earth sure has some pretty damn good reasons to be mad, if she is. I'd be mad if I were her.

I meditated -- sent soothing thoughts to Earth and to the people of that area. Prayers for a long while till I fell off to sleep again.

When I woke three hours later, Katrina had been downgraded from a category 4 to a category 3 storm. Earth calmed down a bit.

Another thought came to me: in these huge catastrophes, we give ourselves social permission to be kind to one another, to strangers. We go about rescuing, sharing, sheltering people we don't know. As if they were important to us.

Is that what it takes for us to get it? Disasters?

It takes disasters for us to be compassionate with each other?

Just conjecture here, but since, as I said in my last post, we're set up to expect to be loved without condition, my guess is we are also set up to draw to us what we hunger for. In the current state of the world, expressions of unconditional love are so rare. Virtually the only time we see it expressed in a large way is in the middle of disasters.

If, as quantum physics suggests, the universe responds to what we're subconsciously needing, maybe in this time of widespread shutting off from each other, disasters are the only tried and true mechanism we know of to elicit widespread unconditional love. To open our hearts.

If it is, that is a damn sad state of affairs.

I say we don't need to wait for disasters to give ourselves the social food we are all craving. Let's give ourselves social permission right now to care about each other and act on it, for no other reason than it's what we're all so hungry for.