Kevin Walton King: During Crisis, Love is Essential

I was hesitant to write some of my thoughts during this time of change and transition due to the Coronavirus. The main reason is because it seemed odd to me to offer my metaphysical musings at a time when people are looking for physical solutions: Food. Economic resources. Material comfort and the like. But I realize there is no time like the present to focus on what is important to us. Finally, more people, including our mayors and governors are asking, what is essential to human culture and life? What are things or activities we can do without? Maybe in this way we can begin to live simpler and more sustainable lifestyles.

At the micro level we can ask the same questions. What is important to me? What gives my life meaning, joy, and strength and vitality? And when we find the answer, we can then find the courage to make sure that we commit to those things. For what gives us joy is a gift not only to ourselves but also to the world. Without these gifts being let to shine, we are left collectively poorer and wanting.

In my own life, I’ve found that love is essential. But I also understand that during trauma and crisis and times of transition it can be very hard to remember that love is essential. That joy is essential. That a smile is essential. That creativity is essential. The teacher said that ‘we can not live by bread alone.’ That means that there is an intangible nature to life. A spiritual nature. You can’t name it, but you know it when you experience it.

Trauma and crisis and transition bring our focus rightly to the material, but life is not only trauma and crisis and transition. The teacher has something to say about this as well when he offers ‘that he came to give us life and life more abundantly.’ The abundant life is a full life. Life in all its fecundity. Flourishing life. Life that beams in all seasons and at all times so that during the harvest we sing songs of triumph and during a drought we shout the blues.

I also understand that this time of adversity will affect our emotional and mental and spiritual well being. For some, it will be exasperating, one more inconvenience and difficulty and chaotic event thrust upon their already overwhelmed life.

For others, it will be like the Polish tale of the Rabbi who advises the farmer to bring his livestock into his home even as the farmer complains that his home is chaotic and devoid of peace and quiet. Many of us, like the farmer in that tale, may experience a moment of liberation when we realize that the majority of our complaints, in the grand scheme of things, are of little consequence.

The majority of us, however, will find ourselves somewhere in the middle. And the blessing of this state is that we will realize that we are a part of a vast continuum, with stress and anxiety on the one end, and liberation at the other. And with our eyes open to this reality we may find that we are a part of an expansive and infinite world full of possibilities. May we all, especially at this time of challenge, experience the greatest of these possibilities.

(This article was first published in The Weekly Oracle)

K.K.

Alan Keving Walton King is one of a growing number of Love Performers who finds creative ways to add love to his life and, in doing so, helps us to remember that love never fails. King is also the author and mind behind The Weekly Oracle, where he is an “oracle for the people – what is substantive, what matters, the heart, the core [of] what is important, what touches us deeply, out of which we come into being, and through which the world is created.”