Welcome! Come in, please. Happy Brunch Sunday from Florida. Let's pretend we are gathered around the pool, six feet close. Raise your flutes or mugs and let's clink a cheers to a bit of connection between work, notices and ads in your inbox.
It's a cloudy morning. I would like to hop on an airplane and get above the gray, to see the blues and the light. I suppose that is what I am trying to do with these emails, really. Today, I may or may not be successful. The body and the caffeine are slow to respond. Late nights with Netflix are building in my brain and liver. If this was a video, it would be in slow-motion.
I also need some form of connection and download with my people. So I will try.
We will keep rising.
Marco Polo, FaceTime and Zoom have been wonderful for seeing and hearing my family and friends. I can read the emotion on my sisters' and parents' and friends' faces, if they choose to let it out. But the spiritual vibes that mingle when in the same room are not there, not quite in the same way.
Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, who turned 69 this week, described the virtual connecting we are all trying to foster. In a rare live stream, before she did a reading of her work, she prayed to feel a sense of the few hundred people who would watch virtually, to connect with them, though they were not in the room with her. It did not happen.
"It's not the same," she said, "It's nothing like being with living, breathing, bodies...everyone together... It's just not the same thing."
My son was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome at eight years old. I wonder if, due to his slight social impairment, he feels like this all of the time. He has been home from college for nearly four weeks. At 23 years old, he'd rather hang out with his friends, but none of them have been in his circle since the pandemic distancing started.
I suppose we all do feel separated, in varying degrees.
I'm a Cancer, and I crave that connection. I have created mental delusions of this in order to stay in relationship with those who do not need or feel it quite as strongly as I do.
Is it easier to be semi-quarantined if you feel no such need?
Does it matter?
This is the gray sky talking.
Today's Deep Breath: (Here's a little juju nugget. May or may not be helpful.)
If there is a bonus to our current situation, it is this:
we can feel the emotions this pandemic fosters inside us, and create something with that emotion, instead of pushing it away or medicating it. It's impossible to feel comfortable or happy 100% of our days. We cannot contain or control the less-than-happy. We can honor it, because it is real, relatable and valuable.
We can force ourselves out of bed and put it to words, or a drawing.
Document our feelings.
Until Next time,
Tami Lowe