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.