March 23, 2020

Hello my friends,

The sun is shining today as I sit here and write to you, but it’s the last of the sun for at least a week.  I know that’s going to be hard for people who are just learning to stay home and be settled, and that makes me feel a bit anxious. (Fellow empaths, you understand: it’s hard to keep from absorbing everyone else’s feelings!) So far, at least in my small world, moods have stayed pretty positive and friendly despite the limitations put on everyone.  With the exception of those stubborn few people who refuse to stay home and isolate (which just baffles me !!) I do have a sense that we are all trying our best to save each other.

A lot of artists and writers have been rising to the occasion and posting extra content online and offering what they can to distract and cheer us all.  I’m so thankful for those people whose first instincts in a crisis are outward-facing.  They help us so much.  I’m not really one of those people.  In a crisis, I immediately go emotionally hypothermic:  all the blood and heat goes to guard my core.  I shut down all the extra functions, including anything creative, and close my circle to those who feel safest and most familiar.  It’s a survival function, as much as the instinct to reach out and connect is for others.  We probably need both things in a healthy community.  Some of us are just second-wave kind of people and our time to create and share and support will come. 

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping busy with projects around home.  My husband is working from my little basement office now (and rightly so, it has the best internet access in the house) so I have been fixing up another space for myself, painting and scraping and imagining new curtains sewn from my fabric stash.  I’ve also been making reusable sanitizing wipes (except I used Everclear since there’s no rubbing alcohol to be found), and cutting up old t-shirts for tissues so that the toilet paper will stretch a little further.  

I wrote at the beginning of this month that my current motto is Ora et labora.  That’s not changing any time soon and this week I’m going to make a new prayer altar as well.  We have four children, one who works in medicine, one living in France for the immediate future, and two who work in industries deemed “essential,” so I feel a little vulnerable about all of them being out and about in the world just now.  Somehow, it seems like a little altar might help the prayers be more real. 

So far, enduring a pandemic is like some kind of freestyle dance between focused work and focused nurturing.  Clean the pantry?  Yes.  Digital minimalism?  Not right now, thanks.  I would love to say that at the end of the day I am using all this time to read hard books and think deep thoughts, but really, I’m just trying to decide if I can eat more brownies and find something distracting to watch, just like everyone else I know. 

~ Once I get my new office space set up and it feels like things settle down a bit, I will get back to work on a newsletter for you.  I had planned on sharing a story this time.  Which is still unwritten.  (*eep*)  It will probably be an April newsletter since the days keep going by in a blur.  Our bookstore shut down so the giveaway will be on hold again.  Gee whiz.  Every once in awhile it hits me how strange this all is and how everyone in the whole world is feeling and experiencing the same thing I am right now.  Thank goodness for all of you who are able to respond right away and help us know what to do next.  I’m going to defrost eventually and get back to the words.  I will try to post something weekly though, so we don’t lose touch.  Thanks for your patience.  When I set up that prayer altar this week those prayers will be going up for you too. 

Peace keep you, my friends.  Second-wave people: no guilt. Just do you.

Love each other well.

tonia