Prior to Covid, I was one of those people who liked to say things like, “change is inevitable,” and “everything is transient” – the words floating out of my mouth, making me sound like the good Buddhist I wasn’t.
I wasn’t a liar, I just didn’t know what I was talking about.
Yes, I’d let go of a long marriage, and I had watched my father die – which, 11 years later still feels inconceivable as I scan for him in crowds, sure he’s out there somewhere. My children have moved away, an important and deep relationship ended this year, my ex husband is about to move out of state with a new partner. I do understand that things change, but it wasn’t until the entire world fell to its knees in what seemed like a matter of days that I felt the truth of impermanence and got an actual taste of the fragility of our lives.
The poet, Ellen Bass, has a beautiful passage in her poem If You Knew…
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
I’ve read this poem many times, but I think I preferred it as just a pretty thought – something that would be good to remember when I could, but not practice if I didn’t have to.
I remember the day in March when I first heard the term “sheltering in place,” and how I kept forgetting it over the days that followed. I’d turn to my daughter and say, “Sheltering where? What are we doing?” Or the day before shut down when I stood in a packed Whole Foods with at least 200 other people – hardly anyone wearing a mask – me holding my little red shopping basket with a few extra cans of black beans because I couldn’t imagine a world where I couldn’t go back to the store to get what I wanted whenever I wanted it.
Then suddenly we were all behind closed doors, veering away from each other on the street because your neighbors, your own family could get you sick. We didn’t know very much since there was no leadership then – and little leadership now. Maybe that’s what’s gutted me the most, the final bit of illusion ripped away. No Big Daddy coming to save us.
Fifteen weeks later, and it’s still like the wild west. Everyone’s making their own rules, negotiating the mask, the gloves, deciding whether it’s safe to hug the people you love, or travel 350 miles to see your mother – who has been alone – because you don’t want your final images of each other to be on a Zoom screen.
Fifteen weeks later and my 25-year-old daughter decides to go to a bonfire with new friends – none of whom are masked – which means she won’t go to L.A. with me to see her grandmother because she might have picked something up – something she could bring home to me, which I could take home to my own mother.
Fifteen weeks later with no vaccine in sight and we’re beginning to wonder if it’s possible that a year from now our lives won’t look much different than the way they look today.
It is a lot to hold. I cry almost everyday. Sometimes for the things I have lost, but mostly – I believe – for the fragility of it all, the impermanence – something I understood theoretically, but not in my heart.
My friend with cancer didn’t flinch when the virus came.
“This is so much like my diagnosis,” Ciska said. “You’re stripped of the known, the habitual. There’s a loss of the familiar self at all levels; the illusion of health, your profession, your relationships, your very identity. Everything that you thought was you, a given, is gone.”
Having cancer, Ciska said, was like entering an endless hallway with one door closing and no new door in sight.
“Now we have Covid,” she said. “We’re all in the collective hallway.”
“And what do we do in the hallway?” I asked.
“You decorate it,” she said. “You engage with the uncertainty. It’s not a place to move away from, but a place to sink into and be with.”
Be here now.
Another slogan I want to be careful to use, something to be practiced and not preached, certainly by me.
Still, there have been moments, like yesterday resting in the shade of the side porch with my cat Gray on my lap, staring at the crows in the tree overhead. Or the spontaneous bath in the middle of the day because I needed some quiet comfort.
“There’s magic here,” Ciska said. “The magic of turmoil. We don’t know what our lives are going to look like on the other side of this, and so we’re in a transformational time. Things are less solid and in that more malleable state, in this hallway, magic possibility lies.”
Ciska reminds me that caterpillars dissolve before they turn into butterflies. If you cut open a cocoon, caterpillar soup will ooze out.
I’ll hold that thought today, because holding onto something, even a thought, feels better than holding onto nothing. We’re in uncertainty soup. Change is inevitable. And change can be beautiful, as our caterpillar friends teach us.
You just can’t rush the goo.
Thank you to Ciska Moore – my friend since we were fifteen years old – for helping me to better understand her experience of cancer.
And to Jeff Greenwald for his sharp editing and his desire for me not to say the same damn thing in every blog post.
Here’s the rest of Ellen’s poem….
If You Knew – Ellen Bass
What if you knew you’d be the last
to touch someone?
If you were taking tickets, for example,
at the theater, tearing them,
giving back the ragged stubs,
you might take care to touch that palm,
brush your fingertips
along the life line’s crease.
When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase
too slowly through the airport, when
the car in front of me doesn’t signal,
when the clerk at the pharmacy
won’t say Thank you, I don’t remember
they’re going to die.
A friend told me she’d been with her aunt.
They’d just had lunch and the waiter,
a young gay man with plum black eyes,
joked as he served the coffee, kissed
her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left.
Then they walked half a block and her aunt
dropped dead on the sidewalk.
How close does the dragon’s spume
have to come? How wide does the crack
in heaven have to split?
What would people look like
if we could see them as they are,
soaked in honey, stung and swollen,
reckless, pinned against time?
Listen to Laurie reading Uncertainty Soup …
If you want to create a self paced writing practice to take you through these times, join our Wild Writing Family, a monthly membership where you will receive three short, Wild Writing videos a week with me talking about the practice, giving you a poem and some jump off lines. Twice a month we write live together. It’s a beautiful family.
It is weird to be alone with two cats right now. All the food is delivered, the ex husband has moved to colorado to be with the new girlfriend. 21 years of marriage “poof”. My 2 best friends are gone, my mother is in hospice. I can’t visit my 102 year old grandmother. I’d like to slap the next person who talks about being grateful. It’s worse than then last years ‘balance’ nonsense. Fortunately you can’t slap someone from 6 feet. Or online.
Lovely post and poem. Made me think of my haiku: “the caterpillar/ never hesitates from fear /of transformation.” Thank you, Laurie, for expressing so well what we are all feeling now–scared, uncertain, angry. In the midst of it all, I want to be looking for the opportunities to be present here and now, whatever the circumstances.
Well said, Stephanie. My heart just gave your heart a sad little 6′ wave of recognition.
Beautifully written, Laurie. A perceptive tap into the zeitgeist with a realistic, insightful awareness of caterpillar soup on the side, provoking transitional uncertainty and anxiety. Thank you!
Thank you for this beautiful writing.
This was amazing!!! Thank you Laurie. ♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️♥️
As always, Laurie, you go right to the heart of the matter. Thank you for making it OK not to be OK right now.
Never fail to have me crying in my coffee. I can relate to so much you so beautifully write. I have no more words. But thank you.
Why does reading this, and then listening to your voice, as you read it, shine a comforting light on this blurry goo, this morning at six thirty?
I am a knitter. I have knit 3 blankets since the shelter in place began. I’d never knit a whole blanket, even one, before this.
Thousands upon thousands of loops through loops. Sticks and string have “decorated my hallway” as you put it. Kept me from dissolving in my own goo. Thank you for your words. They have helped me find my own, and shone a light into this (what I believe to be) long long hallway. We keep looking for doors. I am not finding doors. But I begin to see cracks and have started wondering if these knitting fingers can dig too. Thank you, Laurie, for creating your 27 days of wild writing community for us here in the ether. I, for one, have needed this.
“Saying the same damn thing…”
After quarantining for more than three months, I went to my cabin at Silver Lake last weekend, and found myself hitching a ride to the upper road and inviting someone into my cabin, things I never do in my in my city life. My cabin sanctuary has to be guarded too. And when I returned home there were things I had to do and ran two errands and came home and wondered why I went into overdrive when I returned and am looking forward to the peace of staying at home writing and creating peace. And this weekend I’ll return to the cabin. Will I be more careful or simply slip into the life I’ve known there for 32 years?
“There’s magic here,” Ciska said. “The magic of turmoil. We don’t know what our lives are going to look like on the other side of this, and so we’re in a transformational time. Things are less solid and in that more malleable state, in this hallway, magic possibility lies.”
(Huge, 6-feet distanced hugs to Laurie + Ciska + everyone commenting here. No matter what, we are all in this together. Writings/expressions/art like this can be medicine.) 💕
Love love love and miss you. In the goo with you.
Love “the magic of turmoil”.
Caterpillar soup.
🙂 Fifteen weeks later and it’s like the wild west!!!!!!! That made me laugh. I actually live in the literal wild west! Keep on walking in beauty and thank you for your 27 Wildest days!
Your writing always affects me and this time is more true than ever. Here we all are, stripped away of all things once familiar, wondering what’s next. And me, right this very instant, renting a cheap roadside motel room in So. Lake Tahoe after four days solo time in the High Sierra, wondering if the shower I just took can sustain me another four days. I know deep down I can’t run away from the uncertainty, the fragility. I have a home and someone there I love who loves me. I need to go home. Together we can navigate the goo.
In this world where for me right now everything is spinning so fast, your writing- you- make me stop, notice, feel. Thank you.
Ah Laurie. Thank you for your story and this poem. I can truly say I have found enjoyment being in-place during these past Covid-weeks. As an avid traveler I’ve been open to the adventure of things found in-place – on-line courses and their meaningful life/lessons, food-shopping, Zoom calls and seeing friends, cooking, the simple joy of sidewalk-socially-distanced gatherings. Yes, the novel and fun ways to see and be in my ‘new’ world have been an unexpected time of enrichment. In all of this, two of my classmates of 56 years had major health issues and another has died. Teenagers when we moved to different paths as we left our birth-country we reconnected with each other again years later as wives, mothers, grandmothers. Now as we continue to grow older I have asked myself: if I truly knew and understood life’s turnings, what I would have done differently? Many things as it turns out, but they all boil down to this: I would continue to notice and despite embarrassment, do more of saying out loud my in-the-moment feelings – of love, appreciation, wonder, disagreement even – regardless of what “others” may think or say. Because in that boiled-down stew, for me those are the things that matter. If only I had known this fundamental truth years ago.
Dear Cousin,
Your post touched me deeply but this, so well said, in particular;
“It is a lot to hold. I cry almost everyday. Sometimes for the things I have lost, but mostly – I believe – for the fragility of it all, the impermanence – something I understood theoretically, but not in my heart.”
The here and now is where the rubber hits the road, – if you’re into metaphors. The juicy, heartbreaking now. We are all of us so wounded and hurting. I suppose it’s no surprise that some are acting out like spoiled children.
Sending you and yer Ma buckets of love.
Beautiful. Thank you. To bastardize a quote I read the other day: “We’re not in the same boat, but we’re in the same storm.” xo
Thank you again, Laurie, for making the intangible so real. I love you!
can’t rush the goo 👋👋💕
Laurie, you provide me resonance in this writing. My own feelings about this damnable predicament of pandemic are rarely matched by newscasts, politically/morally correct people with whom I talk, blessedly positive young people who are by nature more flexible. It’s not nice to express the fear I hold of a world in chaos brought on by lack of basic needs, and the meanness of people living much closer to survival instinct than ever thought possible. Melodramatic – that’s what people would say. Don’t want to hear it – that’s what people would think. I don’t want to think it – but it coats all my organs, and plays out in my dreams. Am I the only one? I doubt it,
I want to bring it out in the open to expose it to the random natural forces of nature. Only in that way might it dissipate.
Lovely way inward, an introduction to a wonderful meditation. I was certainly imbued with a strong sense of feeling centered, albeit the turmoil. . .Linda
Good thoughts, beautifully expressed.
Laurie, thanks for your magic with words. It helps me to understand we all are traveling often the same trail, however, our experiences can be similar in some ways and sometime very different. Stay safe.
I am looking for the cracks.
Peace,
Frankie
That’s it. Theory & Practice. xxx
I love this and you. And I never feel like you say the same thing. And I love that you’re crying and that Grey and the crows are keeping you company.
Beautiful! I love this, like I love you in this human rawness, vulnerability, and fragility. What you write has always been true–I love that you cry everyday—I can’t always get there but when I can it is such a relief. Loved Ciska’s words. One of my closest friends died of cancer during this “sheltering in” and another is fighting for her life—with cancer—covid19 is a shoulder shrug for them.
So true. Thank you for putting words to all of this. Love to all of you.
Just on time. Just finished writing this morning about the mystery of death and everything in life ending at some point. Remembering an argentinean poet saying about the rain something that I can apply to impermanence; let it come, let it rain. Each drop gives back to everything, its hidden brilliance, or as your dear friend said: you engage with it, you let it be, hoping there lives the magic. Where else could it be? What else do we have? Thank you!
Thank you for saying what my heart feels. I cry almost everyday.
This touched me deeply today. Having moved into a new and temporary dwelling today in a town I have been in since March by chance, your piece struck a chord. Looking out my window at an unfamiliar and quiet landscape adds to the eeriness of uncertainty and direction. where am I now? where are we? where are we going? what will we do when we get there? Beautiful writing, thank you.