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I paused in the frame of my open front door to gaze up to the sky. Black clouds were dancing with white, having appeared out of nowhere. Instinctively, I reached up towards my head, pulled off the Hermes scarf wrapped around it, “just in case”, and locked the door behind me.

Phone? Check. Signed Attestation form? Check. Mask and gloves, yes those too. But tonight I also carried an empty plastic sack and a pair of scissors in my pocket. I was going on a mission.

We all have our guideposts that are helping us through. Good habits or less so, to shape our days during the lockdown period of the pandemic. I turn towards others, frequently, when I become overwhelmed by the news of the world, the death rates or even the pounding of my own anxiety. Because there is help to be found everywhere, or nearly, if we look; for it is disguised in many forms.

My friend Jamie Beck (I call her my friend Jamie, although we have only met twice, for that is how I think of her in my head) is an internationally acclaimed photographer who has shot for such varied clients as Cartier, Disney and Google. She and her chronically handsome husband Kevin (who is equally brilliant), along with their “so lovely as to not actually seem human” fairy child Eloise are living in nearby Apt, after having an about face from a distinctly glamorous life in my former home of NYC.

Like me, they are in a town, and in an apartment. This, during lockdown, presents challenges.

However, Jamie did not back down, or cower, or binge-watch through the afternoon (of course that would have been perfectly acceptable if she had). On March 14th (three days before the official start of lockdown), she made an announcement: “I decided today to take the power back from losing work, losing freedom, losing support, and get into the studio to commit, to as long as this crisis has a hold on us, and create one original piece of photographic art each day.”

And so she has. She has called the series “Isolation Creation” and has invited fellow artists around the world to join in with their own works. Her pieces are of breathtaking beauty and deeply imbued with poignance. With the materials that she has on hand, she creates, carefully constructing and then photographing dioramas of a complexity that would impress the Dutch Masters. And yet there is a lightness of spirit to them, for this is Provence after all.

Desperate times call for desperate measures and so she and Kevin will go out “foraging” in the one kilometre radius that we are allowed on our daily walks. Now…I originally was taken aback by this idea. Were they really snipping away on public land? Yes. So does that mean, perennial good girl that I am, that I could possibly do the same? Yes.

I admit that it took me a week to get up the courage. On my evening “stay sane” strolls, I would spy out wildflowers and weeds that were pleasing to my eye. Yesterday, I took the plunge.

When the first raindrops started to fall, I begrudgingly wondered if life was teasing me for “breaking the rules.” But I crossed the massive, now empty municipal parking lot, heading towards my goal. With each step, the rain increased. I could see it in the puddles, that became pebbled with each beat, hitting faster and faster. “I should probably turn back. I can do this another time,” I thought. But a quiet voice answered, “It is only rain, Heather. Go on.”

At the first snip of the magenta hued buds hidden behind a fence, I knew that I was right to have continued. I carefully laid their lacy frames in the sack for fear of breaking them. They had been my primary objective but I stood to trace my steps backwards, slowly stopping to cut free a jangle of grass with drooping pods, thick ropes dotted violet, delicate butter yellow blooms and a sheaf of green wheat.

With each breath, the rain came harder, until I could hardly see. I was wandering through a downpour. And yet the sun was shining so brightly through it all. Somehow the moment was so…completely unusual that I felt ecstatic. The golden rain, the stolen flowers, my white linen shirt stuck to my skin. What could I do but lift my face up with ridiculous gratitude? I wanted to laugh, to skip, to run.

And suddenly, a memory, a very early one, came surging from my head right to my heart. It was of a little me dancing around in the rain on a summer afternoon, carefree, so long ago. There I was, on the patio of the same house that my Mom had grown up in, deep in the Ohio countryside. I had long since cherished that memory, held it dear as a “before” of pure innocence. And yet here I was, feeling exactly the same at 50, in the middle of a crippling and heart-breaking pandemic. Elated.

Light is possible. Beauty is possible too. This crisis does not negate the eternal.

I smiled at the others that I passed (at an appropriate social distance) on the way back to my apartment. We had all been caught out in it and nobody cared, on the contrary, it did us good. Once inside, I laid the flowers on the tile floor, poured myself a glass of wine and looked at their individual grace.

With a gentle thud, I plopped down on to the floor next to them, getting up only to fetch a vase and free some little strangers who had unwittingly come along for the ride. I positioned each stem with the idea that I had in my head, making adjustments until I was pleased. This is no ikebana but a rough and ramshackle arrangement. I thought it fitting to how I felt in that moment.

Imperfect. But alive. And free.

PS. I am getting a lot of feedback that many of you are unable to leave comments. I made an adjustment to the settings and so hope that will help. Thank you for your lovely emails! 

Today’s offering is a poem. I am honoured that Rémy Deck, a brilliant musician and composer, offered to score my recording of it. That is to be listened to first, if you please, and then you can find the transcript and an explanation below.

I am judging myself every day. Whatever I am, whoever she is, not enough, not right.

Compared to those who are scared to feed their families, am I a fool because I fear for all?

We are in a new hollow. Deep, yet, with not knowing.

I can barely type, my fingers heavy on the keys. And I cry with anger over the impossibilities that are being shouted in my country as certainties, regardless of the additional lives that could be lost.

Of course, it does not matter, now, who is doing the “better job” in this crisis for it is up to us, globally, to do the best job, as a community, whole.

So, me, and you, let us think to put our ego thinking aside…that continual train that says, “No.”

It would seem as though while we cannot help but to listen blindly to our world leaders (some of whom are doing whole heartedly well while others are shouting out through the dark) we most certainly can listen to ourselves. Instinctively, we know.

What needs to be done. What is not being done nor taken under hand?

As this goes on, I cannot imagine that anyone but us will actually make the change for things to be better.

Can we do it?

In the midst of our every day, every night grief, can we pay respect to all whom we have lost in saying “Ca suffit.” That’s enough.

That’s enough, now. That’s enough.

(and yet we are so far from done)

A few weeks ago, Ruth Ribeaucourt sent me an article entitled, “That discomfort you are feeling is grief” . It was an incredibly helpful tool at a time when we were not yet speaking of universal grieving but it has come back to me today in acknowledgement that one of the primary steps in processing it is…anger.

I wrote this poem last night because I was so angry that I couldn’t sleep. It is anger that has such amplitude that at times, I turn it in on myself. So without, so within. Anger that somehow, despite all conceiving, my home country has a dangerous president who did nothing, is doing nothing when his country is deep in crisis with nearly 50,000 deaths already reported with more to come. Who casually suggests disinfectant injections – which are most-likely lethal – as a possible cure for COVID 19. That a financial bailout is readily available for large corporations while people like my Sister struggle around the clock to keep her small business afloat. And what about the family featured in This New York Times article , who do not know how they are going to eat and whose daughter is vomiting because they can no longer afford her much needed medication? That there are people getting in line at 4am for food donations and will have to wait six hours to receive them?

How is this possible? How? In the so-called world’s richest nation? We have to speak up. This has to stop. That’s enough. We can do so much better than this.

So here we are. Right in the middle of it. Maybe. Because, honestly, none of us has a clue as to what is really going on or how long this pandemic will last. I am not a news bandit, never have been, but I listen to the wires of the world to try and hear what my fellow human beings are thinking…let alone, what decisions their governments are taking (sometimes on their own) for us.

One of the tiny but yet important things, belonging to the hum and thrum are these discussions. Amongst you, amongst me and all over the world.

It’s both odd and not – everything is to me, actually, in this moment – but I mean specifically what we are saying to one another during this time.

Do you see it? Or am I alone? But I am having conversations that are achingly direct. Usually, we would warm up to this sort of opening, at best, over months.

And yet here we are.

Virtual friends that I have never seen in person, nor have heard their voices, have suddenly offered a shared agreement to be open, a sort of grace.

And that feels scary in itself beyond belief.

So here we are.

What is amazing, is that we are all so rock bottom dollar, that we have given up the game of (fortune and fame) to just admit, “No, I don’t know what is next. And I am scared.”

What a difference this is, you know?

Our collective, western society has been droning on for so long, “I got this.” “I got this.” It is the engine behind what we were taught to be.

And yet, of course, we have been thrown to the seas; monsters are knocking at the door…caving it in. Choose your metaphor.

What is beautiful…and yes, it is hard and unfair to talk about beauty within this ongoing breath of death…but. But…there are, and have been a lot of exchanges that are…beautiful. Tears shed and words broken like bread.

As we struggle on, day by day…we speak.

Some yell, but most speak. And often, in so doing, they rattle the cages of their vulnerability, whispering what they would never dare to otherwise.

These moments seem to be the building blocks of our future.

Or could be.

“I can’t do this anymore.” “I feel alone and I am tired of it.” “I don’t want my life to be some form of bullshit just because society says so.” “I am not going back. I am not.”

What I am hearing.

To say, listen. Listen. Listen, can you listen?

(We can be all of the things we did not think we were capable of.)

To ribbon up my two previous posts, a Leonard Cohen quote – one that I have cited here before but seems especially appropriate now: “There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”

 

Those midnight days. As if there is a hole in the roof of our collective church, and the rain is falling down, down through the beams, drops falling free.

And yet, there is Beauty ever-present. Unrepentant. Partout. 

She can be garish in comparison, this thing called Spring. And yet how we need her.

We breathe, we “can’t breathe”, we check our breathing. Upon rising, or at every twinge or cough. Knowing that there are others who are asking elsewhere in great fear escalating. Silently, we say thank you.

It is like a litany, this gratitude. Beads on a rosary, for those of us who are relatively ok. Who do not have to call every hour to check on a loved one’s status, who do not have to contend with a lost job, less food, bitter feuds or finances.

Or loss. That felted word, death. Not for me yet, not yet, so thank you.

I beg the tears to fall for release. It is part of the terrain of a too feeling heart and
yet they do not come. I am such in shock. A grieving for all and those who will never be again.

Joan Sutherland, a teacher of the Zen koan tradition recently wrote: “Grief is a form of love, how we go on loving in the absence of the beloved. It is the transformation of love through loss, and how we are initiated into a new world.”

If this grief is like a chapel onto itself, stone upon stone and block by block, there must be a light somewhere in our beings, even when whispered as quietly as a prayer. Or so I believe. One gives birth to the other.

We are here, we remain, what will we be?

During the late afternoon’s sweet golden hour, or the early morning (it is now 5:30 am), these are the questions that I ask myself. Blinking in the dark, or heart racing.

The response doesn’t feel like Hope. Hope is calling something into being and it feels too soon for that yet.

No, but perhaps…I can have a spark of Faith. One not born from any religion. It feels like to refuse that feeling would be disrespectful to all who are fighting so hard in order to move through and beyond a reality that is brutal. Incomprehensible. We must stand by the side of those on the front lines. In a hospital or a home.

So I will hold that light gently. For myself, for my family and our broken but not fallen church of the world. Faith just is, it exists and that feels like freedom.

Despite my falling down (or sitting numbly still), that is an active choice that I can make so that it may grow and go where needed. It will.

PS. I am updating this post to include an article from the NY Times about our universal – and personal grieving during this time of the Corona virus. It is absolutely worth the read, most certainly if you catch yourself in a state of blame…wondering “Why do I feel this way? So much?”…This can help.

https://nyti.ms/3aWoraY