At this point, stay-at-home orders seem an endless spooling of time towards the horizon, except there are few of our standard markers of measurement (when did I last shower? Have I brushed my teeth today? Who knows?).
Anyway, here are some Thursday links for you. Click on what’s interesting and ignore the rest.
Whether or not you have children tugging on your sleeves, locked in the house with you, you are aware of the compelling power of boredom. But boredom can be just a pit stop. In this link, Agatha Christie notes, “…there’s nothing like boredom to make you write.” I am still waiting to be bored enough, I suppose.
Bored or not, go watch Portrait of a Lady On Fire. Best viewed in HD, this lush love story is nothing like you’d expect (and not nearly enough nudity, but ah well. We can’t always get what we want.).
But…there is some good news. The SXSW Film Festival may be canceled, but Amazon is putting films from the SXSW festival online, for free, for what would have been the ten days of the festival. Bonus: filmmakers who screen their films will still get their screening fees. As of the time I typed this post, there was not yet a set date, so mark the site and check back.
You know what I mean – whenever I update anything, everything that previously worked seamlessly suddenly doesn’t work. This is why yesterday’s post has no picture and why what I am typing right now looks like my old Commodore 64 from middle school.
I am apparently unable to upload a picture to my blog anymore, which is disappointing, at least to me. I get a “The response is not a valid JSON response” message, which seems impossible to fix.
Hey, people who know WordPress. I will pay you eleventy million dollars to help me fix this. I am utterly flummoxed and more than a little hostile about it.
Can we talk about how last night I taught yoga online in the granniest of granny panties, and IDGAF?
Like, so granny, the kind hospitals give you after you have a baby and leave the hospital, that go all the way from the place where your ass meets the top of the back of your upper thigh to fully grazing the beginning of your thoracic vertebrae?
Yes, THAT GRANNY.
And when I was changing into yoga clothes to teach how it was a decision I made to not change, not into a thong, not even into something less likely to peek out from the back of my activewear, because I am finally realizing what the feeling the world is experiencing is, and I need comfort wherever I can get it?
It’s grief. We are in mourning.
Whether or not you agree with the way the U.S. culture works, and I can assure you that I do not agree with most of it, it is the water we have been swimming in for a very long time, and the tank has sprung a leak.
Following this revelation (I started this particular post around 8 pm Sunday night), I had a massive anxiety attack, the worst in awhile, way back to the days when I used to black out in the middle of them.
This anxiety attack had an additional feature: uncontrollable shaking. I have been known to shiver as an anxiety attack recedes, but this shaking was like having a seizure, only I was fully aware and able to stop long enough to go throw up.
It was so bad, I had to hold my jaw open to prevent me from smashing my front teeth in as they gnashed together (they have short roots, I am informed, and it will only take the slightest nudge to knock them out).
Triggered, is the term, I think. I am triggered.
This shaking may have been trauma, held in my body for so long, trying to make its way out. The linked article (which I highly, highly suggest you read) explores the idea that our brain responds in a very orderly way to disorderly occurrences (like, oh, say, the death of your husband or the stressful unknowns of a pandemic). The reptilian brain kicks into gear when confronted with a stressor of any kind. This keeps us alive when we need to respond, as in when tigers are chasing us.
But what if the tigers are constant – real or imagined – and the rest of the brain is not able to spring into action to process the emotional response or to allow the brain to understand what occurred (the cognitive processing of an event)?
We are literally unable to “shake off” the trauma and our bodies remain primed for action. Conventionally, this is referred to post-traumatic stress disorder.
I have been collecting trauma in and of my body for an entire lifetime.
Being a learning robot and making an effort over a decade to recover and manage, I have been doing all of the right things – going to nature, eating well, attempting to meditate, (finally) managing my access to news and social media – so it is especially disheartening to have this occur.
I have no answers. I don’t know why.
This is not a blog for that.
We are living through trauma. We are surfing an ocean of grief that may or may not have anything to do with losing the life we have now but may instead be a compendium of a lifetime of damage in the body, damage that comes from just getting by, stuffing things down, insisting we are ok.
I am not ok. I am better than some, but even saying that invalidates the sentence before.
I am not ok.
But I am learning. I am here. I am working towards letting go. I am reaffirming what is important. I am developing tools within myself.
I feel at my weakest. I feel I am the strongest I have ever been.
We are all of us swimming in contradiction, far away from land.
For ourselves and for each other: let us be kind and patient. Let us be compassionate. Let us move slowly and lovingly and remember always to breathe.
Found on a walk – someone other than KWeeks also moves interesting pieces of wood around
My grandmother turns 102 in December. She was born during the Spanish flu, lived her teen years through the Great Depression, married a husband who left the day after they married for World War II, and is now on lockdown in an assisted living facility that has seen zero cases of COVID because they acted early and fast. She is lonely but resigned and waiting patiently for the pall to lift.
This poem today is for her. I think she might think it was pretty but not go much farther than that. My wish for her, as a person whose time on earth is closer its end than its beginning, is that she might be able at some point in the remainder of her life, see or hear something that kills her with delight.
Obvi, not literally. Good lord.
Mindful by Mary Oliver
Everyday I see or hear something that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,
to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light
of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
I dare you to make these and then argue with the title of this blog.
If you are just here for the cookie (and I don’t blame you), you can find the recipe on Smitten Kitchen. Everyone knows the best chocolate chip cookies are crispy and chewy, and that’s exactly what I searched for and exactly what I got.
Of course, these use my gluten-free flour blend, and I used a mix of regular and mini semisweet chips. Also, because I am sheltering in place on my own, I baked half of the batch only. The rest I scooped into individual cookies with an ice cream scoop and am freezing. Pop a cookie onto a baking sheet and bake it up whenever.
For those of you who are here for cookies and the rest of the blog, keep going.
“You need not leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. You need not even listen, simply wait. You need not even wait, just learn to become quiet and still, and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
Followed by this from Paul Éluard: “There is another world, but it is in this one.”
If ever there were a book for our time, it is this one.
We are all (most) of us, sitting, and some of us (like me, now) solitary. I am waiting, I guess, not exactly solitary, and there might be the problem. With our shithead of a president failing to lead (or demonstrate his ability to be anything but the inept moron and terrible person he is), infections and deaths rising in what I believe are falsely deflated numbers, and people feeling the sting of isolation for two weeks (official two weeks isn’t even close here in Maryland – we have only been under stay-at-home orders since March 30), we are still filling up our time and mental space with what we used to do, only now it’s online.
Certainly, we mourn the freedom of movement we used to have, but whenever you get too down in the mouth about that, imagine you are in prison right now, and your prison has just been issued stay-at-home orders for two weeks, and your home is an 8×10 cell that you share with another person who is not of your choosing.
But I digress.
The point is (and for the chocolate chip cookie people who stayed, I know. Sometimes it takes a minute to get to the point. But I usually make it there eventually), once we come out of this, if we have not gotten quiet, and still, and solitary, what will we come out to?
I think one positive part of this (if one could spin anything to be positive) is that the terrible, anti-functional parts of life in the U.S. have been laid bare. Too many people are one paycheck away from disaster.
Our hospitals are not equipped for large-scale disasters. Our healthcare system essentially ensures that the poor and the brown among us will die from lack of care or be destitute following the minimal care they receive.
The entire country feels this lack – witness, among other things, the rabid clearing of all toilet paper from stores and the hoarding of everything from masks to hand sanitizer to, of all things, flour and yeast. It is a true thing that when our survival is threatened, grasping for things we can hold (e.g., toilet paper) provides us with a feeling of stability.
Someone on Instagram wrote that they thought rationing (as in World War II) would be better because then at least you would be guaranteed your carton of eggs.
We have no guidance, no leadership, no calls for coming together at the federal level (including the laughable federal “stimulus” package that bails out the few large businesses at the expense of the small and of individuals. And the people who pick our vegetables and toil in the fields? They are fucked.). In Baltimore, and in my neighborhood, there are community resources being made available for those who are suffering, and I have seen beautiful examples of people helping each other.
But on the national level, Congress and the Shithead-in-Chief are pointing fingers and worrying about whose fault it is, still propping up big corporations that can absorb the shock better than the little guy, and probably scanning the globe for a war that might pull us out of what looks to be headed in the direction of the Great Depression, part deux.
If we think we can emerge from this pandemic the same as we went in, we are mistaken. We cannot compare this pandemic to the flu in the sense that most of the world had no idea the rest of the world had the flu, too. The name “Spanish flu” was coined by Spain because they thought they were the only ones who had it. With the internet, we are so globally intertwined that it is impossible to ignore the shuddering halt to which we have come and the consequences. I don’t think as many people in the U.S. have ever thought about the term “supply chain” as much in the history of this country.
I don’t want to be the same. I want our whole country to not just stop and be quiet but to listen and be still, to evaluate which parts of the old system are good and valuable and which parts we can discard like so much rubbish.
I think it’s obvious that we have reached late-stage capitalism and that center cannot hold. Note: if you click no other links in this post, click the late-stage capitalism one. Jesus.
I think it’s also obvious that our healthcare system is unutterably broken. We have been looking at this pandemic not as a public health issue with the potential to ravage the country but instead as a drain on resources, the same drain that occurs when uninsured people are forced to avoid going to the doctor until they end up in the emergency room. Healthcare is the privilege of the wealthy; this was clearly illustrated for me when Idris Elba reported receiving a COVID test in the earliest days of the pandemic because he had been in contact with a person who tested positive.
Pause here to give props to Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland (I am a raging liberal Democrat who did not vote for him) who saw this coming in January and took some steps to get ready. Not enough, but more than the federal government who knew for sure it was coming and ignored it.
WE CANNOT BE THE SAME COUNTRY COMING OUT OF THIS.
We cannot allow the same inequity to persist. We cannot choose corporations over people. We cannot allow our elected representatives on both sides of the aisle to get away with lip service and pandering this election year.
Personally, I think the changes we need to make to emerge better from this pandemic are too sweeping and too hard for the small-minded people in power to comprehend. States seem to be doing a better job on their own (most of them, except for these nine states, plus Georgia).
I despair of any resolution to this. We are too big to not fail, it seems.
As I write this, I hear a peal of laughter from my neighbors down the street. They do still get together outside but no longer huddle in a close circle with their children ranging ’round. The chairs are there, the kids are out, but they are a studied six feet apart.
The wisdomkeepers might say that things are unfolding as they must – that this is part of the revelation (which, as my book points out, has a curious Latin root word that means “to veil.”
I feel like the world is actually rolling freely, unmasked, at our feet, if not in ecstasy but then certainly with wild abandon. If there is another world in this one, now is the time it will reveal itself, I think. Perhaps we are not quiet or still enough to notice yet. Perhaps we never will be.
