I Took a Walk

I took a walk to clear my mind, to stretch my legs. A simple stroll turned into a game of six-feet-between-strangers and then the concept of a walk changed forever. At first, I wasn’t sure how to navigate this new world.

Then, I found myself stepping more on the earth instead of the pavement. My eyes searched the forest for signs of Spring, signs of food and medicine. Two legs carried me past a playground covered in caution tape, led me to a stream. I sat in the eroded valley bed, a bowl, a womb, watching water trickling by. No matter what is happening with us humans, water will still flow downstream.

Taking a path I’ve never taken led me to a local school. I found the grounds of the football stadium dotted with people moving their bodies, far from one another but closer to themselves. Two cars in the parking lot drove with teenagers behind the wheel, practicing for that undetermined time when the DMV will again open. As I rounded the side corner of the school to face the front, I was greeted by a sweetgum tree, spikey balls radiating out onto the earth from a nucleus of twisted roots. There was a nostalgia to this moment, something I remembered from long ago.

I realized that almost no one I saw had their face to a screen, they had orchestrated their presence and time here precisely to be far away from smartphones filled with scary news. There was this glimpse of the 1990s on that walk that flashed before me. But, there was also something else, something wordless, vast and infinite, something I could not yet describe. Something new.

A Beautiful Mess

I left my house Friday and drove around for the first time in a couple weeks. I was hoping to find a trail to walk in the woods for a little bit. I miss the trees, the silence and loving embrace of nature. We are blessed to have balconies in our apartment, but the noises of traffic and trash in the woods are often all I can focus on when I'm trying to sit in the sunshine.

I drove to a few trailheads that I knew well. All of them were too crowded with cars. While driving, I saw people outside shopping, large groups playing basketball, children at playgrounds... I also saw the signs on the highway telling people to stay home and an elder picking up trash along the side of a busy street. I ended up at my old Elementary School because I knew there was a patch of woods and also lots of open space. I saw even more people playing basketball. I also saw kids on bikes keeping their distance and teachers wheeling an aquarium cart to their car to save their class pet.

While I sat in the woods, it was hard not to notice the mess, the trash, to want to fix it, to be angry. In particular, there was a plastic bottle whose wrapper read "tropical paradise" on it that seemed to taunt a little extra. It was hard not to get distracted by the awful din of I-95 as it echoed up from the valley. I thought about how I had spent so much of my childhood at that school with those sounds of traffic, so extra loud in the winter when most of the trees were barren of leaves. I walked the back of the field and visited the trees that were planted using the planting plan I created when I worked for the County. I thought about how each species was chosen by me and in what order and hoped that I chose well. I remembered how I used to look out across that valley past the traffic and toward the college I would one day attend, to study environmental science. I thought about how I planned most of my life to leave this place and I did. But now here I am again about to hunker down for an indeterminate amount of time. And how it cannot be any other way.

I have followed this virus very closely since it first arose in Wuhan. I have been consulting the science daily and making logical decisions based on data and what epidemiologists recommend. Because of this, I bought extra food with each trip to the store for my family weeks before the shelves at the grocery store started running low. I haven't stockpiled. I have isolated and tried to make choices that are best for my community, for humanity. I have practiced the mindfulness techniques I learned over the past ten years to get myself into a good head space. I have allowed myself to feel fear, but tried my hardest not to let it overwhelm me.

I have also been reading and listening to a lot of spiritual takes on what is happening right now with COVID-19. Spiritually, we may be dealing with how we can collectively release fear and illusion. We need to stare the truth in the face and find new ways to communicate with each other. We need new paradigms, systems, and ideas for how we heal our relationship to the earth. Of all of the species that have ever existed on earth, 99.9% of them are now extinct. We are but a blip in the timeline of the earth's history. I want to be very clear that humans are NOT killing the earth with climate change, we are killing ourselves. The earth will be here long after humans are gone. Collectively, this virus is showing us just that.

I love humans and humanity. I love the ways we are good to one another and take care of one another. I love how we fight back against oppression and oppressors and demand better, demand justice, demand truth. I love how we tell stories and give each other hope.

And yet.... any yet... right now I am STRUGGLING with others. I am struggling with myself. I want to do more. Be more. I want others to care. I am tired, so tired, of screaming into the void.

I believe that a lot of the problems and toxic systems that exist in the world are inheritances. They are what we are given as children, what we are taught, but not what we need to accept. We can and must do the work to first acknowledge and then to dismantle the hierarchical power structures that oppress and deny our connectedness. There are so many who have been/are doing this work already and who are holding new visions of how we can show up for each other and for the planet. It gives me such hope.

I don't know what the future holds. I believe everything, life as we know it, especially in the United States, is going to fundamentally change forever. I don't believe in "all good, everything is better, back to the way it was before." There will always be hardships, loss, suffering. But, there will also always be love, truth, and kindness. Life is messy, humanity is messy.

I just hope we can more fiercely take care of one another.

On Sickness and Gratitude

Several weeks ago (starting on February 24), I contracted the flu. I woke up that Monday morning coughing and with a general malaise. Soon after, I answered a phone call from my sister (whom I had spent nearly the whole weekend with) who apologized profusely because she had just came back from the doctor’s and tested positive for the flu (type-A).

Having not had the flu since I was a young child, I was skeptical that what I had wasn’t just a cold. However, halfway through that Monday my fever shot up and did not come back down again until Thursday morning. My head hurt so bad during the time I had a high fever that I could not sleep for more than two hours at a time, I could not watch movies or read because focusing my eyes on anything at all was excruciating. I spent three nights in a row awake nearly all night just staring off into space, weak, drained, unable to sleep, barely able to eat. I contemplated the concept of a virus, a lot. I wondered how my body was fairing in the fight.

Once the fever broke, the ride wasn’t over. I spent many more days in bed exhausted with a violent cough. My chronic illness decided to flare just as soon as my fever broke. I quarantined myself in the bedroom and my spouse slept on the couch and fed me all of my meals. For over a week, I pretty much only went back and forth between the bed and the bathroom with no physical contact from another human being and very little socialization or entertainment. The quarantine seemed to work because my spouse never got quite so sick, although did develop a cough and fatigue. Today, 19 days later, is the first day that I woke up and my lungs have felt normal, where my cough has generally subsided.

It has been a wild ride.

I have had a lot of time to think about health, mortality, gratitude, purpose. In the time that I have been sick, MFA rejections have been rolling in, a global pandemic began, and I had to cancel my trip to San Antonio for AWP which I had been looking forward to all year. In the end, though, this experience has really forced me to be thankful in a big way.

I have a ritual at night before I go to bed that I call the “gratitude rock.” I hold a fossilized coral stone I keep on my bedside table in my palm and think of ten things from the day that I am grateful for. With each item I let a finger unfurl until my palm is open to the stone and then curl them back in until I am grasping the stone again. I continued this ritual while I was sick and it illuminated things about my life and experience that I couldn’t have known had I not been so violently ill. I found myself feeling deeply and profoundly grateful for things like my bed, a moment of sunshine, a cuddle from my cat, a text from a friend.

Sometimes my nighttime ritual feels like a chore, a box to tick off. It is tempting to quickly list items like food, shelter, a warm bed, health, etc and not actually feel any gratitude for them. But, nothing in this life is promised. I am not owed any experience or circumstance. Allowing myself to sink into the gratitude of what I do have is a practice that has transformed my life.

I am grateful to be alive.

Boundaries

Boundaries have been on my mind as of late, as both the invisible lines that divide, as well as the demarcations that keep our personal lives safe and sane.

One one hand, boundaries are invisible state lines in the USA that determine who can go to college for what price, who can get an abortion, have access to medical marijuana, and who can use which bathroom. Boundaries enforce laws and regulations. Boundaries are walls erected at borders. Boundaries say you are a Democrat and he is a Republican. Boundaries restrain mixing, keep people and places separate.

And yet, boundaries are also the rules we set for others and how they are allowed to treat us. They are the very foundation of healthy relationships, offering permission to a certain point… and no further. Boundaries are an unwillingness to sacrifice, abandon, or censor the core truth of the self. They are an invitation to collaborate and share, but with stipulations on what goes too far.

Boundaries are complex and contradictory and that makes them worth writing about.

When nature divides itself into boundaries, ecology calls those divisions the edge. Edges are the borders between ecosystems, for example where the shoreline meets the sea or the forest meets the field. Edges are areas where two environments converge. They are important ecological centers of interaction where plants and animals can utilize two environments instead of one, fostering the creation of networks, interdependence, and cohesion.

Using the example of the border of land and sea can illustrate the exchanges that take place. On one side (in the sea) we can find coral reefs teeming with diversity of sea life and on the other side (land) we see tidal pools bursting with life of different forms. Through the edge, there is an exchange of material (salt, rocks, shells, fungus, bacteria, organic matter, etc.) that might not otherwise happen deep at sea or far on land. And those exchanges can and do enhance one another so long as one side does not completely overtake or submit to the other. There is a balance that is upheld in order for both sides of the edge to benefit, if indeed the two are to mix.

The media these days seems to repeat ad nauseam the narrative that the US is “polarized” and that citizens are “more divided than ever.” However, looking to nature, to balance, to healthy social boundaries are there strategic opportunities that lie in wait in the mixing of the boundaries and edges we have created? Then again, can unification and cohesion of “both sides” really be a viable strategy in the threat of fascism? In the face of hatred, of racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia what choice is there but for the tides to rise up and obliterate the shoreline?

How I Got Distracted During a Digital Detox

It’s Sunday and the first item I wrote on my “to do” list was to write this blog entry. Yet, I cleaned my entire house, cleaned myself (i.e. showered), and made lunch (in the process re-cleaning the kitchen) before sitting down to write. Writing is now one of the last items I will check off having been distracted by cleaning. But, for today, that is okay.

Distractions still find ways to kidnap my focus even in the midst of my own version of a “digital detox” inspired by the book Digital Minimalism. I am of the opinion that digital distractions are among some of the hardest to navigate in present day. Countless sites are engineering our attention and apps are getting more and more addictive. However, distractions go far deeper than the digital world.

Social caretaking responsibilities and administrative tasks will always exist for most people (although in varying and disproportionate rates due to gender, race, and socio-economic class just to name a few). The goal of increasing focus, therefore, cannot simply be attained by eliminating distractions all together. Life is inherently distracting. So instead of avoiding distraction I can instead look to support focus, which I know I can achieve in two ways. By creating both anti-distraction habits and environments that support increased concentration, I support my focus.

For example, when I need to get serious writing and work done, I visit the library. Even with the smart phone in airplane mode, there are always far too many cleaning and administrative tasks at home. I often get stuck in completing those items when I am feeling productive, prioritizing them over my work. The library is an environment that I can count on to support my focus.

Certain sounds are also incredibly distracting for me. So, I have a habit of always carrying earbuds in my bag. I know from experience that thuds, tapping, rattling, and even white noise can send me searching for dopamine hits on websites designed to trap attention. If the library becomes noisy, I can pop them in and listen to music that helps me focus. My favorite right now is this playlist.

Paradoxically, cleaning can sometimes help me focus because cleaning is an environmental change that can support focus. The trick (for me) is to not get mentally exhausted doing the cleaning. I can choose to spend time cleaning worrying about all the work I am not getting done OR I can let the cleaning be more of a meditation, a practice in presence. Exercise and meditation are great for focus, as well. Any activity that helps get the mind into a flow state can quiet negative or fear-based thoughts enough to get into a state of flow.

One thing that I have learned during this digital detox is that, in a world where our attention is increasingly being hijacked to advertisements, it is important to remember that distractions have always and will always exist. And perhaps, because of this fact, it is even more important to stay mindful in all the ways one can support their focus.