Later Than Expected

I love the African American spiritual Kumbaya. I love its repetitive nature; I love the melody; I love the feeling it invokes in me, that of holding hands and coming together to sing in gratitude and in praise of the Lord. All of the refrains speak to my heart, but some resonate in my soul:

Hear me crying, my Lord, kuymbaya.
Hear me praying, Lord, kumbayba.
Oh, I need you, my Lord, kumbaya.

When the folk music trend became popular in the 1960s, this song had a resurgence and became an anthem of sorts, praising the concept of camaraderie, of coming together. As a child of the 60s, I’ve embraced the belief that meeting people half-way is a more productive problem-solving solution than being an autocrat. This was my parenting model, too.

Mothering is a powerful force. There was a time, when my children were young, that I could solve their problems and alleviate their worries with a steady hand, and my parenting bag-of-tricks of hugs, kisses, and cuddles. They’re grown-ups now and the hugs, kisses, and cuddles come from them to me more often than not, nowadays.

My daughter knows instantly by the sound of my voice how my day's going and when she thinks it’s been rough, she will ask, "Mommy, do we need to hold hands and sing Kumbaya?" I love that about her. I love that her heart is so open; that she has empathy and sympathy and compassion in her soul.

As with many of us, though, she is struggling in this time of quarantine, struggling to find acceptance and gratitude and optimism and purpose at a time when life, as we had come to expect, came to a screeching standstill. 

Expectations. A word heavy-laden with both hope and disappointment.

A recent conversation with her highlighted this disappointment; a cancelled trip home, postponed to some later unknown date. The sadness radiating between us was tangible, even though we were on opposite sides of the country. 

This pandemic crisis has wreaked havoc with emotions and perspective. In the yardstick measurements of grief and loss caused by this virus, I am fortunate that I can measure my sadness in millimeters not yards. But life is not lived in the comparative; everyone’s pain is real and we were both grieving the loss of not seeing each other.

A day later another conversation, filled with hope. The emotional compromise she worked out for herself was that future milestones and moments in her life will just have to happen later than expected. What a salve that was to my bruised spirit. 

Later than expected. Three simple words. A reminder that life will go on, that plans will unfold, that we will all, most certainly, be able to give real time hugs, kisses and cuddles again, that a steady hand in any time of crisis provides balance and comfort.

Hear me singing, my lord, in gratitude.

In the Shelter of Each Other

I live in a rural part of California. My home is surrounded by a three acre greenbelt of pasture that separates me from my neighbors. I’m also far enough out of town to be physically detached from my local community. Distancing myself from people has been my lifestyle for years, albeit a lifestyle that I chose.

When I first moved to this spot, my guy repurposed a Tuff Shed, turning it into a creative space for me. Throughout the years this little workspace has served many roles: as a sanctuary, an escape room, a crafting space, an Etsy thrift store and, closest to my heart, a writing studio. 

I’m sitting it in now, looking out the window at my neighbor’s cows reflecting on the limited world we live in today, thinking about the words shelter-in-place, social distancing, self-quarantine … phrases that remove us from each other’s lives. The whole world is in clutches of COVID-19, an amalgamation of letters and numbers that when unravelled represent a global pandemic that has changed how we engage with each other.

In my morning reading I came across this beautiful Irish proverb: “It is in the shelter of each other that people live.” How do we shelter in each other at a distance?

My go-to solution at stressful moments, what I find the most solace in is words. Particularly the words of my favorite authors that have guided, challenged, tutored, inspired and, without doubt, comforted me in times of uncertainty.

Here are a few of those I shelter in with at times like this:

Harold S. Kushner
Anne Lamott
Terry Tempest Williams
John Steinbeck
Edward Abbey
Billy Bryson
C.S. Lewis
Eudora Welty
May Sarton
Robert Frost
Wallace Stegner
Michael Pollan
Brad Kessler
James Michener
Truman Capote
Joyce Carol Oates
Mary Austen
Jonathan Weiner

… and the writer, Craig Childs, who, after reading his book House of Rain, sent me on a quest throughout the four-corners area of this country to follow in the footsteps of the Anasazi, now more commonly referred to as Ancestral Puebloans. His writings about this “vanished civilization” provide a peek through the window of history at a society that flourished for centuries, and then collapsed in a handful of decades

I pulled if off my shelf recently, struck by the relevance of how they lived toward the end of their time on the Colorado Plateau. If you wander enough (I have) past the great houses they built at the peak of their society to the outcroppings of dwellings found in the rock niches, nooks, and crannies of mountain ridges as their society began to fail, you’ll find bricked-up small spaces, crypt-like in nature, where they hunkered down, surviving on the margins of their once powerful society.

It struck me as the definitive manifestation of the current situation the world is in; tiny shelter-in-place fortresses that isolated them but, in the end, didn’t safeguard them. So, they left, moving, dispersing, and then reconnecting and rebuilding communities.

The Irish had it right: it is in the shelter of each other that we live. It may look and feel differently right now. We might have to redefine how to interact in ways that help us flourish apart. We might have to be imaginative and resourceful to keep ourselves mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally healthy. We might have to adapt.

In this moment, I find comfort in examining this past society that, in spite of hardship and suffering, made a remarkable transformation that allowed them to thrive in unimaginable ways. So, too, can we.