Draw your chair up close to the edge of the precipice and I’ll tell you a story. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald
I had a long night of pandemic anxiety dreams, ones with infected people coughing on me, texting my mom and getting no response, a haunted grocery store, not being able to breathe. Eric was in a funk yesterday, the stress and frustration of our current situation and his work weighing heavy on him, and it had rubbed off on me a bit. Panic and grief and irritation are close to the surface these days. I meditated and wrote first thing when I got up, and didn’t want my practice to end because then I’d have to face the rest of the day. I did finish, and then I checked my phone.
There was an email from our grocery store, letting us know they were enacting new policies, specifically limiting the number of people they’ll allow in the store at a time. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the Democratic race for president, so our best hope now is Joe Biden (yuck). Singer songwriter John Prine and Charlotte Figi, the namesake for Charlotte’s Web’s CBD products, have both died from COVID-19.
Last night at 8 pm, many of my neighbors went outside and howled at the moon. It’s actually something they’ve been doing every night at that time. I opened the back door to listen. The back of our house faces west, so I was also looking out at the sunset, pink and orange over the foothills. The sound of howling and the color of the sky, all of us there together but also alone, made me start to cry. It reminded me of that moment at the end of the movie Troop Zero when the girls are standing on top of a picnic table under the stars, all yelling “I’m here!” at the sky, hoping someone will hear them, or the first lines of Andrea Gibson’s devastating poem “Orlando.”
When the first responders entered the Pulse Nightclub after the massacre in Orlando, they walked through the horrific scene of bodies and called out, “If you are alive, raise your hands.” ~Orlando by Andrea Gibson.
This morning, (this mourning), I’ve been listening to Ani DiFranco’s cover of John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery” on repeat. When it feels like my heart has no more space for anymore grief, it grows and I manage somehow to hold it. My heart at this point is as big as the world, broken in places, and my body feels like it can barely contain it, like it might burst right out of my chest.
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to. To believe in this living is just a hard way to go. ~”Angel from Montgomery,” by John Prine
I’m still here. So are you, kind and gentle reader. That’s what I’m holding on to today.
4. Beautiful Writers Podcast, whose latest episode is an interview with Joy Harjo, U.S. Poet Laureate.
5. Offerings worth checking out:14 Days of Calm & Comfort for only $5 with Courtney Carver of Be More with Less, and Courage & Comfort, a A 2-week online pay what you can writing group with Jena Schwartz.
6. This Pandemic Is Not Your Vacation. “You might not want to spend your quarantine in a city. But the rural places many Americans treat as playgrounds, and the workers who keep them running, will suffer for it.”
7. Wisdom from Jenna Hollenstein: “It is completely normal and human to prefer pleasure over suffering; it is also completely normal for grasping onto pleasure to increase our suffering.”
13. Resilience: 3 Questions for You from Adreanna Limbach’s latest newsletter. “I’ve been paying close attention to my own moments of loneliness, melancholy and restlessness, and what questions have been useful to deploy — to make this unsettling moment a little more bounce-back-able into some semblance of sanity and ease: without minimizing the reality of what we’re experiencing here. Together.”
17. The Quarantine Diaries on The New York Times. “Around the world, the history of our present moment is taking shape in journal entries and drawings.”
19. The Routines That Keep Us Sane. “More than most, writers have experience with what the poet May Sarton called ‘a limbo that needs to be patterned from within,’ and they provide us with some relevant case studies in how to weave that pattern.”
21. Acknowledgments 2020 from Seth Godin. “It’s worth taking a second to think about people who are doing more than expected, more than they have to do, more than we can imagine.”
22. In case you missed it last week: Some Good News with John Krasinski. “We would love to hear Some Good News and share it with the world.”
This site is an attempt to bring people closer together during a time of fear and isolation. By participating in the same assignments hopefully we can feel a bit more connected and on a simple level it can give us something else to focus our energy on. There is much joy to be found in the simple, the mundane, and the everyday. We just have to look a bit harder than we have been.
Paying attention is an act of rebellion during a time when distraction is at an all time high. So let us start our own attention revolution. Let us become artists of the everyday and in doing so may we experience a lightness of spirit and a respite from our real world struggles.
25. None Of This Is Normal from Chuck Wendig on Terrible Minds. One of the best things I read this week.
33. A message from your granny. ❤ (video) “I see much sadness and stress on my timeline today. I think y’all need some Wee Granny. She’s 93 and trending worldwide with good reason: Wee Granny is the voice we need right now. Thank you Islaanne from Edinburgh!”
Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray) 