There are mornings of pure bliss like being able to stay in bed a little longer. Then, there are afternoons where there doesn’t seem to be a good enough of a reason to get out of bed- but even if we are noticing the four walls around us a bit more so they feel like they have the capacity of caving in, even if our purposes have felt re-directed, re-configured, or even paused, there is so much growth from the thinking and feeling we are in a way being forced to face. Beyond being safe during a pandemic ; It’s a strange thing that we are all expected to be in one or two places right now- that we are all spending some time thinking about who we are without everyone else, where we are going without leaving, and how we are without anyone asking.
I had a professor before all of this ask our class every now and then how the moon looked the night before, or how the sky was that day. She would look around the room scanning to find a truthful and immediate answer. We all knew her intentions were to urge us to look up, but I don’t think any of us understood the power we had in looking up. She wanted us to look, to gaze, to stare, to see, & to notice. Now, during this quarantine I find that if I close my eyes I can perfectly match up the color in my mind to the color of my walls, I know exactly how the lights buzz, and how many seconds it takes the shower water to warm up- but why wasn’t the easiest part of my day long before any of this, looking up?
I started to think about things as if we are all in our own cocoons; growing, learning, & being- getting a chance to do something on our hardest days we have asked the universe to allow us to do, to think. Some of us are having trouble in caves, others are having difficulty breathing, others are sacrificing their shortness of breath to assist others in living, others have for the very first time felt ‘essential’, and many of us are uncomfortable in the separation from normalcy. This is not a time where we are all feeling, experiencing, and understanding the same things- but we are all undergoing the overall weight of something so peculiar, unknown, and unpredictable.
We have been in wars with each other far before this began.
I stay hopeful in all of this being “over” that we’ll actually smell the fresh air,
we’ll hug each other a little tighter, we’ll value presence as well as absence,
we’ll cheer each other on at 7pm, at 8am, and again at 4:30pm.
we’ll like Monday’s a little more, and we won’t wait until our days off to feel free.
