Your Friday Bulletin is here and contains

• Your Covid Update
• A Perspective on Delta
• Advice for how to handle it: always thinking about the middle path

Covid Update (some bad news)

• National Cases have tripled from the recent, pleasant, hopeful lows. 
• To put in in context: current 7 day average is 45K new cases per day; up from a recent low daily tally of 12-15K/day. Highest peak of the pandemic: 275K/day; 
• It’s generally still in certain pockets, like Missouri and Florida and LA, but ticking up just about everywhere.
• Our area has seen a slight uptick. 20 cases per week (up from 12) these last 7 days. The peak last year was 500 weekly cases! We are still quiet, but inching up.

The big question:

What’s with Delta? (some good news) 

• The White House is calling this a momentous and critical point in the fight.
• The word from the inside crowd, however, is that this is not expected to be a mega COVID explosion. This is expected to peak quickly — a couple weeks — and then quiet down til school starts.

Regardless, fatigue is rampant and tensions are high. Mandates and passports or not? Children to receive shots or not? The media has been whipping us up for far too long and it’s not healthy. You should see the doctor’s discussion forums. They’re brutal. Polarized and uncivil.

Nature’s message

Nature shows us that polarities are a fact of life.

I. Look at a plant. Roots are dense and underground and colorless and odorless. Blossoms are the complete opposite. These are poles containing inverse qualities!

And notice that there is a mediating middle zone: the leaf.  It occupies the middle, a very important part in a polarized system!

II. The human body also contains opposite and inverted polarities: the head on one side where the outer world makes an impression in us (sense perception); and the limbs on the other side, where we leave our mark on the world (through our actions).

And the heart and lungs are the middle between the head, on one side, and the limbs (and metabolism)  on the other. The middle organs balance the others.

III. Our geography even shows the polarity pattern:

Take right now. The arid West is dry and on fire. The East Coast is flooding. The coasts have always existed in contrast to one another.  California has Hollywood as well as its “New Age” dreaming. The tightly wound corporate grind out east provides a contrast.

And in our middle? Isn’t it interesting that we call it  the heartland. Traditional values, kind folks, middle road.

Conclusion

Let’s spend our last couple minutes letting these middle, heart forces inform us.

August has the feeling of being the heart of the year. The lion is connected to both the sign of Leo (7/21–8/20) and to the heart.

What virtues do we connect with the heart: courage is one. Also compassion.

Instead of outer wars (with the virus) begetting inner wars (with each other) we hear a call from the heart for inner peace to solve it all. Compassion is the heart’s tool that balances the polarities and makes them part of the whole.

Socially, in polarized scenarios, you are either the aggressor or the victim. And often you can’t tell which one. And in neither role are you free from the other person. Freedom is only reached through the heart and compassion. When there is a healthy middle, the poles can be free.

Nothing has to change in the outer world for us to practice compassion. We can control the whole theater inside us.

Instead of at war with a virus what if we considered ourselves to be in the biggest communal classroom that the globe has ever known. More people than ever before: all together in front of the same teacher.

And the lesson at hand is to study how Compassion that becomes freedom is a key for getting through the Delta wave.