Sherri Mitchell - The Corona Transmissions: Alternatives for Engaging with COVID-19—from the Physical to the Metaphysical

Royalties from this anthology go to the Land Peace Foundation

The soil you see is not ordinary soil... it is the dust of blood, the flesh, and bones of our ancestors.... The land as it is, is my blood and my dead, it is consecrated.

SHES-HIS CROW

The Land Peace Foundation is a small, native-owned, Indigenous rights organization that is committed to the preservation of Indigenous culture, land, and water rights and the protection of sacred sites. We provide low-cost legal services, alternative dispute resolution, and training programs for Indigenous peoples and their allies who are working to build strong and effective Indigenous Rights Movements.

The five participating Wabanaki tribes are: Penobscot, Passamaquoddy, Mikmaq, Wolostaq, and Abenaki.

The preservation and promotion of the Indigenous way of Life includes the protection and preservation of Indigenous land, water, religious and/or spiritual rights; proliferation of cultural and traditional practices; strengthening of kinship roles; and preservation of ceremonial ways of being. The Land Peace Foundation provides a wide range of cultural, educational, and spiritual programs and is committed to be an objective resource for information on a variety of issues and concerns regarding Indigenous ways of knowing and being.

The Land Peace Foundation also works to facilitate the creation of enduring solutions to the ongoing threats of cultural genocide against Indigenous populations. Our purpose is to eliminate the likelihood that Indigenous peoples will be thrust into violent conflict; forcibly removed from their lands; stripped of their rights and/or resources; denied access and meaningful interaction with vital sacred places; and experience loss of connection to historical and emerging cultural practices.

CREATING NEW REALITIES

RICHARD GROSSINGER

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (or COVID-19) is the biggest event of our lifetimes, bigger than Hiroshima, the Asian tsunami, and the Islamic State. It arrived on the global scale of World War II but more comprehensively and discursively, for it is too tiny to defend against, too elusive to avoid, too swift-moving and eclectic to vanquish. It entered human history, ecology, and supply chains with the suddenness of 9/11. Though not as quick and stealthy a strike, its extent, duration, and toll have far exceeded a jihadist attack.

Ultimately, climate change will enforce a greater duration and toll than either 9/11 or World War II while joining COVID-19 in a futuristic matrix. Each is what philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyper-object, a mixture of natural, cultural, and symbolic features that is vaster and more entangled than any cultural terminology or system can encompass. Together they formand overdeterminea hyper-objective Earth that is approaching us faster than we can approach it.

COVID-19 has created a new publishing category, perhaps the most instantly voluminous since Gutenberg. Some of its earliest texts were intended for the evangelical market and invoked Gods punishment for the heresies and gender politics of modernity. Other books and articles proposed a homeostatic ecosystem trying to slow climate change. A coronavirus that doesnt kill everyone (like ebola or anthrax) forces us out of unexamined exploitation of Gaia and back into right relationship. Earth is not a dumb stone with some water, marketable minerals, and DNA fuzz but a living being that is part of our bodies.

Later texts addressed the mysteries and riddles of COVID-19, the hurried global searches for a cure and vaccine, and a new cultural, economic, and artistic ordermore equitable societies and fairer wealth distributionsthat might emerge from viral lockdown. QAnon-like fables sprang up in pandemic fashion, casting the virus as stealth bio-warfare, political sabotage, a make-believe ailment with fake statistics, a meta-intelligent code or message from a higher intelligence, a Zen-like teaching from the microbiome, a socialist or capitalist plot, a poltergeist or haunting, debris from a comets tail, or the advance weapon of an extraterrestrial invader. Threads of these float through this anthology, and it also offers more nuanced and hopeful approaches.

Before putting together The Corona Transmissions, Inner Traditions briefly considered publishing Laura Aversanos posts as a small book called Love in the Time of Corona (now excerpted within). By the time that idea had been floated, five other books using the same or a similar play on the title of Gabriel Garca Mrquezs novel (Love in the Time of Cholera) had already been announced, the beginning of a burgeoning trope addressing a new world of social distancing, human contact, love, loss, and premature crossing over. Authors described homeless encampments on former pedestrian sidewalks, dystopian romances, murders of crows dominating cities and villages (flocks of these magician birds are called murders), herds of rats running down streets with the abandon of buffalo or lizards on desert rocks. The Mad Max landscape was medieval in its succession of panels: The Year of the Plague.

During an April phone conversation with Laura, I described a very bold crow that had landed next to me. She asked for an iPhone picture. I was too slow. She said, Hell be back.

A day later, Yes.

Have you named him?

Why, I wondered, would I do that?

Awaking in the middle of the night, it occurred to me, The crows name is obvious: CORVID.

Lauras email response:

Wow yes of course. perfect name for perfect medicine.

He is helping others to cross over but also issuing a warning,

there will be more to come, the earth is destined to purify one way

or the other, man is unfortunately making it worse.

Crow is acting like a psychopomp. I can relate

Corvid the psychopomp,

as is the wind this morning.

Since everyone is sated with COVID information, speculation, and data, what is special and different about this anthology?

For one, it presents a wide spectrum of perspectives, from physical to metaphysical, from ecological to political, from apocalyptic to protoutopian, and from scientific facts and health tips to imaginings, visionings, poems, and awakenings. Voices in the anthology address the virus directly, while others provide channels for COVID-19 to speak to us and through us. The virus is explored in terms of cultural critique, divination, prophecy, warning, elucidation, and opportunity. It addresses our relationship to natureto Gaia, to its animal, planet, and mineral kingdomsto each other, and to the economies and dystopia we have created.

It also gives you vital hard-to-get information about how to prevent and treat Coronavirus-2019. This highly contagious life-form appears to be indefensible, as it throws a baffling array of asymptomatic states and dissonant symptoms and disease courses at the world. Yet potential remedies exist outside pharmaceutical and industrial tool kits. None are guaranteed, nor is there a one-size-fits-all solution, as there might be one day with a vaccine or wide-spectrum anti-viral metabolite. Instead, you will find here First Nations herbal allies and homeopathic T-cell boosters and nosodes. Cached in medical summaries, you will find anti-viral minerals, algae, vitamins, supplements, mushrooms, and anti-malarial inhibitors (both Western and Eastern) as well as sound, color, and light energies, thoughtforms, prayers, meditations, mantras, and affirmations that are indefinable in conventional materialist terms.