April 12, 2020
Today’s
observation- it came up midmorning, for no apparent reason, a deep feeling of
sadness and loss. Even taking a long
bike ride in the mild bright weather, on a Sunday morning when others were
walking too – children ebullient at the prospect of a pending egg hunt and
trees at the start of their flowering, furry leaflets fetal in their form. None of this lifted my heavy heart or buoyed
my spirit. I stopped to put in ear buds,
pressed play for the book I’ve begun – The Overstory, by Richard Powers. His surprising narratives and delectable
language distract me, but my legs cannot pedal out the tightness in my belly. Maybe
I am passing through a spell of palpable empathy – even as I keep my head up
and spine straight, wanting to stay upbeat for the kids I live with. We all here miss the nurturing company of family. I need the medicine of sitting around a table
with those who know me best - laughing, eating, playing cards, drinking wine. And never knowing when or if will come my
time in the barrel with the virus, makes the medicine all the more precious.
And even if I do believe I am riding out the storm in an Iowa Shangri-La, I
feel low down today. And if I were really
in trouble with the beast, good god, I’d be suicidal, given my current state of
mind in a time of even keel living. I’ve
got to get a grip! Ok, this sort of self-talk is not useful or kind (the advice
I’d give if I were listening to someone else) and no doubt, it only piles shit
on the depression pile of emotion I am feeling today. In a mood that makes me thin
skinned, reacting in ridiculous ways to other people’s banter. Here is an admission of inflated conflation:
We have a family message group thready with pictures, news, stories and foolish
blather. After sending out my morning
dispatch, an NPR piece about how we don’t really need to wash our groceries
before we put them away anymore, no one respond with words or emoji. I thought at first, no biggie - until someone
else in the group shared something more banal and got a windfall of responses. It hit me like a dragon unicorn with diarrhea,
it became a slippery slope. The fourteen-year-old in my head decided I must have
done something unsavory or inconsiderate – was it something I said? Maybe it
was last week or when they were five, and I was being a terrible mother. No wonder they won’t let the grandkids come
stay with me now. I was making enormous
leaps of illogic, a clear sign to any rational adult, that this was nothing more
than a rabbit hole, and still I leaped in, telling myself that I was surely on
the verge of being disowned and shunned, and if so, wasn’t better for me to
spare them the discomfort of saying so and just let them off the hook by…disappearing. They never come to see me any way. Here a pathetic pathos was swallowing whole as
the melodrama in was head grew in its ridiculousness. I grabbed my Westie and set of for a walk to
break out of the spell. The truth is, we
are all struggling emotionally now – the wolf has camped out on our front
porch. Have you listened to the news lately?
There is one dramatic story that asserts it has uncovered the nefarious
origins of the novel corona virus; how it is really a synthetic recombinant
that escaped its labs because of sloppy protocols. If that were true, we are dancing with calamity
and only at the beginning of a long siege.
It is a prospect that brought me to think about a plot in a dystopic novel
I read several years ago – A World Made by Hand by James Kunstler. A story of a small community in upstate New
York that is digging out and trying to reconfigure viable living after the
collapse of American society due to a series of unfortunate events, one of
which is a deadly pandemic. The infrastructure has been crippled and the
federal and state governments disabled. Yep, this could get really bad. Even
Andrew Cuomo said in a briefing session yesterday, “we are only coming to the
end of the beginning.” (He borrowed the phase from Churchill, seemed once again
apt for the times). I think what we need
the most now, besides PPE and respirators, is fortitude. A double dose or two. And I think I need to give
myself a kind talking to on those days I get a little blue.
Today’s
image – I appreciate my neighbor who manages her anxiety by gardening and pushing
seeds in soil for vegetable starts. I drink
coffee, while watching her transplant tomato cotyledons from egg carton cells
to red Dixie cups. We chat about how we’re
coping and what next week might be like.
I describe a house wren to her, one of my favorite avians, sadly absent
from this Midwest prairie. We share our
wonder at the symphonies of cardinal song that carries the day. And how important making safe community is, humans
being such social species at our core. Perhaps when I am feeling blue, it because I
am deficient in Vitamin F for family and close friends. Nothing satisfies like sharing space without
even talking or sharing small talk with just Uh huh, a call and response.
Isolation can put a kink in building those kinds of kindred spirit friendships. Someone would say, from fallow ground like
this such things grow. I make a small resolve to avoid the heavy stuff tomorrow
and I snuggle more with my pup.
Today’s
idea – So what if the novel corona virus was synthesized in a lab in Wuhan and
shared like a high school science project around the world, only to escape because of slipshod practices. So what if its uber infectious engineering gave
it the volatility of a grassfire in August outside of Sacramento. The bigger
fire danger is political if we want to focus on casting blame right now, and we
don’t need to fan those flames.
Regardless of what breath of spittle brought it, it is here now and has
our attention, our neat sense of social order and economic security by the Adam’s
apple. Maybe the more important questions to ask are - how will we live through this,
and when we do, what will we have learned about ourselves?
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