It's a time like no other. A time twirling around the deep of strangeness, staking out for itself uncertainties as it swoops down on a world shaken up and traumatized to the extent that it hyperventilates. Dreams and visions that ought to have smoothen the edges of its roughened up waves going up in smoke. Events verging on spiritual and psychological healing seem tethered in the backs of hopelessness as the eyes stare at the growing emptiness that travels deep into the distance.

As the inability of the supermen of science and medicine are smoked out by a time relentless in dread, billions of eyes look in the direction from whence the benevolence of providence may possibly come. These are weeping eyes of people hemmed in by dense forest of an uncertain season, feeling terribly undone as the night comes hastily down on them.

Why has the time turn against itself? What has beaten venom out of it? Of course, the pandemic. Yes, the COVID 19 pandemic. Who is safe? Who can claim immunity to its gall? Who has ever dodged its darts? It selects not a few but many --- if not all --- to devour. The paths on which it treads littered many lifeless bodies and many more bodies clutching to the fading air of life. The gunwales of the hospitals are going under as the ailments come in gusts.

I'm apoplectic at the sight of it all. My heart oscillates between weeping and agonizing silence as I watch the ramshackle house of the indigent engulfed in shrill cries and iron fortresses of the rich melt down by pops of the pandemic fire. I struggle to stay steady seeing the rich dragging the line with the poor just for one or two boxes of food. Should I mention many giant corporations throwing in the towel, many of which swing the whip of furlough while many others draw down the steel door of goodbye.

The bone of the time hardens even more so as the citizens of the world power are indiscriminately banned from coming over by their distant cousins across the ocean. The lion is held up in his den because the rooster has made a demand of him not to ever cross the boundaries. What a thing!

Oh, never before has such forlorn hang over the distances of the earth as it does now! It raises up walls of isolation while tearing down the bridges of embrace. It's indeed a time in the deep, like no other time, but like a time yet unknown. Nevertheless, we can turn its many dingy streets into sparkling colors of junipers, connecting our minds with hope and joy.