I did not realize that it had been nearly two months since I posted here. This seems to be the nature of pandemic time – it’s all one big day until you look at the calendar. I got burnt out on the critical thinking and anxiety about politics and the pandemic. I took a breath, but now am back doing volunteer work for voter education, knowing that in another couple of years, elections may have worsening consequences. On top of that, due to a scheduling glitch, I am in the throes of two writing workshops and barely keeping my head above water.
Yesterday was the second coldest Valentine’s Day on record in Minnesota. Today, the subzero sun is shining through windows dripping with condensation over ledges of ice that formed last night. Usually, this is the time of year when cabin fever is at its apex, but it feels like doubling down after a nearly year-long quarantine. We’re still holed up, masking, avoiding contact as much as possible. The emotional work of unrelenting communication via email, text, Skype, Zoom, Google Meets, Microsoft Teams, and even, on occasion, a phone call or letter, is necessary for school and work and for supporting those in our lives that are more isolated.
A friend once said I was the most extroverted introvert they’d ever met. Part of me wanted to let out a wail but I’m exhausted! Lately much of my communication with others has become a tad rote. I don’t know what I’ve said to whom and I’m pretty sure that the lack of recollection on their end renders it all moot. I protest on behalf of silence. The viola player in our house is currently learning cello as well. Never in my life did I imagine that I’d find beautiful music so aggravating. Or that my husband wandering about the house to escape his work desk would be distracting and irritating. I live with some of the more easygoing humans on the planet. They, however, do not. I can’t imagine how it is for families who don’t get along under normal conditions – they’re either undergoing a severe and prolonged intervention or are ghosting their own living rooms.
I keep reminding myself each and every day that I have a lot to be grateful for – we’re relatively unscathed in the scheme of things. I try to focus on helping those who are not. Still, it feels like too much now. When it feels like too much, I look to the small moments – warm food, the birds singing outside my window (sparrows, man, they don’t give a shit about the temperature), a nap at just the right moment of the day – with the sun warming my reading chair through those drippy, drippy windows.
One of my February goals was to focus on one long poem for the entire month. I chose “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, because I’ve always liked the lines when I heard them out of context. It has 52 stanzas, so I read a couple each day, and then listen to an audio version. I started with the theory that poets know how to write efficiently and that my own writing could benefit from that. It’s still a theory, but I ran across some lines that hit me in my Buddhist pretensions:
I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end,
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Suffice it to say, it is a reminder that all the anxiety in the world, all the imagined possibilities cannot be the focus right now. I need to look around and see what there is to see. I need to value the time when a cello makes the wood floors vibrate. I need to value that my husband still seeks out my company. I think about how my soon-to-be 17-year-old, who is chomping at the bit to be away from her aging and predictable parents, will become a rarity – overcompensating for the independence put on hold these last couple of years. And that silence will perhaps bear down on me oppressively instead as much-missed necessary solitude.
I’ve been forcing myself to meditate in the mornings. Like everything else, there’s an app for it. Mostly though, I focus on breathing deeply and exhaling slowly. There’s a lot of mixed messaging in meditation. Some visualization gurus have you focusing on drawing in breath to the areas of your body that experience tension (although I’d have better luck finding an area that doesn’t!). Or they have you exhaling the “bad” feelings or stress. I’m not sure what I’m doing except reminding myself I’m alive and my pulmonary system is still working which, in this world is a damned good thing. Part of me likes to think of it as a conversion process – taking in the bad and breathing out the good. It’s a literal way of thinking about what I’m putting out into the world.
With a vaccine a few months or more out for our family, I think about how I want to emerge from this weird little cocoon in which we’ve been living. I think about the muscle memory we lose – how to be around other humans, traveling, attending events, being part of an extended family. Still, it also makes me realize what I don’t want to be, how I no longer want to spend my time. Like breathing in the bad and converting to good, positive energy, I went into quarantine with all my baggage, but I intend on leaving some of it behind. With an end in sight this year, this can become purpose-driven time, if I can rally myself. How do you want to emerge from this time? For now, I’m breathing out and hoping we find out sooner, rather than later.
As I’ve written in previous posts, my teenage daughter has been seriously ill. After two major surgeries this year, we are now moving into the chemotherapy stage. I don’t want this blog to become a recitation of medical victories and setbacks, but now I understand why people write them. It becomes your life. How is it possible to write about anything else? In fact, how is it possible to do anything in the midst of this? I’ve been unable to focus enough to read, to really write much, to do anything but read dense medical articles and try my best not to be steamrolled by what if, what if. It’s funny that the what ifs never include positive outcomes. How very me.
Difficult Times
There is, at the heart of all this contemplation, a concrete reason to keep learning how to work with my own mind – I will be a better person, a better parent, a better partner if I can live well with uncertainty. My thinking brain is a construction site – all activity and planning and loud machinery. It does not provide solace. It does not expand compassion. It does not cultivate courage.
about you, you narcissistic twat. To write about my daughter at this point would invade her privacy and likely shred me. She is who I want to be if I ever grow up – self-possessed, funny, and honest. I take so many of my cues now from her. Still, it’s not on her to make me a better person. I have to do the work. I have to practice. I have to be mid-air, still able to breathe, still able to comfort, still able to laugh. I’ve been in flight, trying not to notice the lack of a parachute or wings. The trick is to not look down.
I turn to some old friends in the form of books. I pick up Toni Bernhard’s 
I started reading Ross Gay’s 
It is times like these when other artists save me. I just finished reading 
Mason Currey’s 
through the overthinking that comes with anything I do. First I thought about the fires in the Amazon and wondered how they affected the bananas. Then I thought about how they were predicting that this particular kind of banana would be extinct in ten years, due to various fungi. Extinction made me think about the climate and Greta Thunberg and how adults, in their usually capacity as jackasses, were criticizing and mocking her this week for lecturing said jackasses on their climate paralysis. Then I thought about plastic and the fact that I can’t stop seeing it everywhere, with every product, without thinking about whales’ stomachs.
deleterious, but that’s how I’m telling the story. When we’re in the middle of a situation, our brains have this capacity to go completely free-range, snarfing down every bit of anxiety in its path. Bloated with neuroses and catastrophic thought, we rarely take action that alleviates it. Instead we eat ice cream, drink wine, binge watch TV or porn, smoke pot, go shopping, or rage online – anything that distracts us from the bloat.
Is it not so with any endeavor? How dense and rich would life be if we practiced being in the moment, having the experience, tasting the food, looking at the scenery, rolling words through our brains? Those sentences make me laugh. I’ve been reading Marcus Aurelius’s 
It’s a gray day here at The Green Study and on such a day, in the middle of a Minnesota winter, one has to scrabble a bit to lift spirits. I’m going to share with you a few things that are lifting mine.
I just finished reading Zadie Smith’s 
For writing inspiration, I’ve been picking up 
And I want to say thanks to Walt Walker at 
Instead of connecting with people, I’ve been reading, gardening, and walking. It’s made me more intolerant of small talk than I already was and I know that is not a good thing. I’m in the middle of reading The War on Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It by Shawn Otto and The Age of Anxiety by W.H. Auden. At breakfast, I pour through the tiny print of the most recent issue of The Economist. At night, I’ve been reading The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.
In suburbia, even in the older neighborhoods, walking is one of the most solitary activities there is – no one is outdoors except in transition from house to car and vice versa. On the rare occasion when I pass a walker or biker on the sidewalk, my smile feels strange, the muscles unused for too long. I wonder if it looks as creepy as I imagine it does.
Each time I return from a walk, I do not return the same as when I left. I remembered someone from long ago. I realized a feeling that I’d been ignoring. I saw where I’d been, like peeking into a series of rooms in a large building, to see if I was in the right place. Been there, never want to go there again, that was a nice visit, maybe the next one.
The Green Study 