Here we are— smack dab in the upending chaos of radical change, a living moment of history with a full on revolution underway. A global revolution.

In recent weeks, much of humanity has been wearing masks in public. We are wearing them to protect ourselves, but also to protect each other. Masks are a ritual and symbol of this time. They are a statement of an intention for safety from a virus that is invisible and seemingly capricious, showing different symptoms in different people. They also are a statement of our beliefs systems and our political leanings. We all want to feel safe, and the uncertainty that a global pandemic triggers in us is hard to hold. It has put us all in a more vulnerable situation — but perhaps those of us who live in greater comfort and safety have felt the fear of uncertainty more. Perhaps for people who always feel unsafe, wearing a mask seems a weak gesture. In some way, the pandemic has leveled the psychological playing field. At the very least, for sure we’re all in this together.

Most of us around the world separated and isolated, in order to give our health care systems time to prepare for what might come, to perhaps lighten the toll that COVID-19 could take on our communities. In this retreat, many people have come to greater clarity about what matters most. We find that we care about each other and need each other, and who the other is . . .  that is changing. We are widening the circle.

The time of pandemic is finally un-masking our shadows. We are fighting now, because the masks of inequity are being ripped off, the masks that have kept the privilege and comfort of ‘whites’ safely systematized in culture. In America, we are finally beginning to look at what we have refused to see before. It is unmasking what power-over looks like, smells like, tastes like. These times are bringing more clearly into the light just how power-over leadership (as exhibited so flawlessly by the White House) divides, foments fear, and fosters instability.

It is unmasking how deep our beliefs of separateness have been. Racism, classism, Indigenous genocide —shadows of America’s rise to power are being unmasked relentlessly. And to see your own shit hurts like hell, at first, before it liberates you. The white majority, of which I am a part, is being asked to LOOK. Look at the murder of George Floyd and all those Black men who have gone before him, killed at the hands of a traumatized white cultural system. LOOK at slavery. LOOK at Jim Crow. LOOK at mass incarceration of Black people and the privatization of prisons and prison labor. Have the courage to just look.

We are learning what it is to act as one global family. We are sharing critical information about the pandemic, singing to each other, forming non-profits to help each other, and now — we are fighting more openly with each other. 

As some families know, there is a way to fight that leads to greater understanding, connection and love.

You must be able to hear the complaints of the other and not defend yourself — because the other has something to teach you.

You must be able to stand and listen to the anger and fear and bravado of the other, no matter the terror and anger it triggers in your own body.

You fight because you care. But to fight well, you must be able to stand the fire of the fight, with love in your heart. Only Love is strong enough to support us in this fight.

We may look back on this time and recall it was the moment when we began, for the first time ever, to learn as a global family how to speak with each other, how to listen to each other, how to hold our own reactivity and sit in uncomfortable situations.

 It is the Great UnMasking, a threshold time of change that perhaps you will tell stories of someday to children yet unborn, recounting the time when what kept us separate began to give way to what unifies us.