Since the early news of the COVID-19 outbreak, the news cycle has been awash with reports of the death toll. Lots of numbers and statistics have been tossed around, but nobody has firm data. If you follow the news enough, you can get wrapped up in it. The news junkies I know are manic about catching the disease and either dying or having someone else close to them die.

The concept of planning for the deep future is a difficult one for many modern folks to comprehend. We’re used to near-instant communication with our hand-held computerized phones. The promise of pizza deliveries in thirty minutes or less. Online orders for merchandise in two or three days. Unless you are an architect, a civil engineer, or perhaps a construction contractor, many of us rarely think about doing things that will affect other people many decades or even centuries in the future.  Most of us plan our lives for a relatively short span of weeks and months. For me, the exposure to this notion of Deep Future thinking began some twenty years after becoming Wiccan. I had the opportunity with several other priestesses to take a midlife spiritual sabbatical of sorts in an American based Orthodox Tibetan Buddhist Monastery.