Nine days in quarantine. Instead of sitting here in my Lakeville study, I’d be on my way home from Ucross today, stopping off in Denver to see old friends, hugging them both long and hard, getting together with their families, going out to dinner at the fun restaurant they’d chosen. Wow. How things have changed in the world, in such a short time. Those plans were scrapped several weeks ago, and as I’ve already written, I came back early and have been keeping “social distance” from my husband and also in quarantine here, in case I got infected in my travels.
I feel physically healthy, really great, actually, which I’m thankful for. Five more days until we can begin interacting in a more normal way. How strange it’s been not to sleep together as we have for fifty-five years, not to hug in the morning, or snuggle together watching the NewsHour or a movie—we saw “Just Mercy” the other night and I can’t recommend it more highly. How critical it has become to be conscious of the importance of this distancing, conscious in each present moment. To my regret, I’ve been growing even more aware of how I act unconsciously, out of habit, much of the time.
It’s hard to stay that awake.
To be continually aware of all my thoughts, desires, motivations, anxieties, movements, regrets and denial takes a lot of work. And more work still, to prohibit them from hijacking my mind and heart. How much easier it has become to resist that work, now that I’m in a less perfect psychic environment. Since the inspiration of Wyoming’s vast landscape and the simple bliss of Ucross’s nurturance are now absent from my life, I’m stabbing at stability, restless and distracted, trying to fend off my desire to keep looking at emails, news alerts, making lists, cleaning out the pantry, taking the dog for another walk. Fury at Trump, his resistance to and inability to manage this crisis, the desire to blame someone for what is happening, the nose drive that the stock market and our retirement portfolios have taken, worry about my son and his family and distress over the sure-to-be postponed launches for my upcoming book, have put me into meltdown mode. My husband and I argue about something whose significance I can’t even remember
Leaving the present moment, I surrender to the temptation of imagining future scenarios, none having a positive aura.
I sit for a half-hour of meditation and experience my mind’s similarity to a toddler with ADHD, the thoughts and fears and memories it holds colliding into a tangle of unbalancing dissonance.
How uncomfortable this is.
“The mind likes to be gathered,” I say in an afternoon conversation with my artist grandson, newly and precipitously returned to the family nest from his college spring semester. I remind him that art –whether writing, drawing, photography or music—is a way of achieving that, of transforming the trauma we are all feeling now into something concrete, separate from the spinning uncertainties our minds so willingly create.
He, fellow creator, wholly agrees.
And, as often happens to me in conversation, drawing thoughts from the hazy realms of my own head to join with another’s, I find the ease I seek for my own mind’s pain, and maybe some for his as well. I want to sit down with that toddler, give her crayons and paper, a cup of hot chocolate, a big hug.
Despite my grief over losing the residency haven where it was so much easier to write and read uninterrupted for days on end, I determine to bridge the crevasse I’ve fallen into at home with pen and notebook, computer, and the gathered mind that they and I can create together.
Despite the fact that I just don’t feel the flow that Wyoming’s spaciousness offered me daily, despite the sure reality that I will relapse and struggle for self-forgiveness, I’ll keep going.
It’s what I do best.
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We’re in this together. So let’s all try to do what we do best, whatever it is for each of us. There are many arts—cooking, teaching, gardening, caring for children, practicing yoga, dance, or tai chi, singing, science, sports, caring for the many sickened by this virus, plain, ordinary kindness—maybe it’s a time to think about what we’re good at, do more of that, and give ourselves credit for those talents.
Just getting through these days trying to be conscious of our fear, frustration, confusion, guilt, and sadness-- accepting things as they are, not as we wish they would be-- is itself an art we can all try to practice.
I welcome your responses and have loved the ones I’ve gotten. Thank you for reading.