April
21, 2020
Today’s
observation – Things are moving; it is in the news and the air. The Great Pause takes a breath; gears lean
toward engagement. This evening while doing room checks, a student asked me for
boxes. “Do you need them soon?”
“Yes,
please. I am going home.”
“How
soon?”
“Thursday.”
“Two days away - Thursday?”
“Yes!”
Verifying
this information with the Res Life director, I found that it was news to him
too. Parents and students are not
withholding information about their planning; this is how quickly arrangements
for travel to China manifest. I venture
to say that her mother has been working for several weeks to get travel arrangements
in place. A slot opens, and a multitude of requests rise to reach it
first. I learned that students cannot
fly directly from the US to China now but have to triangulate their travel with
a neutral intermediary country. One flew
from Chicago to Mexico to China, another from Chicago to Japan to China. Their trip home is peppered with
quarantines. Another sense of movement
came in an email newsletter from Iowa Public Radio. The current number of confirmed cases here is
three thousand six hundred and forty-one with eighty-three related deaths. Four hundred eighty-two are new cases out of
a Tyson Chicken plant. The government,
feeling the president’s pressure to reopen things, has set up an assessment
survey where citizens are encouraged to provide information to determine if
they qualify for a Covid19 test. Well, I gave my information, answered some
questions, and learned that I didn’t need testing. My lizard brain celebrated,
my cerebral mind thought it was a sneaky way of softening the scarcity. At least the state is testing more
widely. The best display of something new
movement, though, was a clutch of goslings paddling between their proud parents
like rubber duckies down the Mississippi in the evening sun. April has been pushing hard to break things
open.
Today’s
image – I thought I was dreaming. News
headline – DEMAND FOR OIL IS DISAPPEARING. Let’s just let that sink in for a
few.
Today’s
idea – Things that get pulled asunder coalesce. Like a river, they are never the same moment
to moment, once space has opened in the natural world, it refills, and the geography
changes forever. Some of the permutations
are incremental, some significant. The
universe tumbles in an ongoing kaleidoscopic becoming. Breathing in is
expansion. Breathing out is contraction. We are breathing in this Great Pause
moment, and emotions with new space deepen, as we indulge in broader
considerations, and all the while questions that even Siri can’t answer float about in our thought
bubbles and chat groups. From my experience on the planet, when the questions begin
to occupy real time and space for more than a flash round of Jeopardy or College
Bowl competition, we should expect catharsis to be loitering around the corner.
It feels like the dominoes are falling -
one moment transforms us, and we transform the next moment. Still, being so early in the process of responding
to such a widespread fruit basket turnover, prospects about how a recovery will
look is still a pipe dream. We expect a
destination to loom down the road almost in view, maybe after only a few curves
in the way. I can hear the child within
me ask. “Are we there yet?”
“No, baby, we have a while
to go.”
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