Stunning disorientation. Going tharn...
So this is what everyone has been naming in oblique ways on Facebook, in the text streams, in the news. I thought I was sharing in that experience. In this first round of #stayathome, I was, as it was to be for me at the start.
I was confined to my home with my beloved husband when I was accustomed to a larger-than-life life in at least two cities and several webs of relationship. I was navigating his fears, my own fears, and responding to the needs of my communities to stay connected. I had had to learn several of these skills over the last year, last several years for online-learning things, so the Quarantine opened avenues for me to be helpful, in multiple vectors of the relationships I cherish most. This is an outdated-addiction for someone like me—someone who learned in her early life she was most safe when helping others, being a help, being the way that others could thrive. (Enneagram Two, for those who enjoy interpreting life in ‘collective pattern’ ways). I have outgrown that soul-center these last several years, except when I haven’t. Like writing to process, knowing I will also want to share it, to be read by those who might see their own experience in it too. 😏 For this crisis time, it was all good work to be about. It connected me with my communities ‘out there’, be they circles, CrossFit peeps, directees, even church folks from more my husband’s side of our life together.
All the while, I kept yearning for the challenges of quarantine that some folks were talking about—boredom, need for structure, need for solitude, etc. [I admit I felt relief at Brian’s and my choice to not have children. The overwhelm of our friends having to homeschool amidst previously overbusy lives…? I feel we missed a bullet on that one, even though I know the sense of connection and family is being strengthened so for them, aware of it or not.] I kept wanting the challenges of others in this time, being focused on them, out there…
And so I used the energy of yearning to do the final pushes for remaining, if less immediately deadlined, tasks. Yesterday seemed to mark a watershed of some kind. I completed a couple tasks from a leadership-training a friend and I had held this past year. I steeped in the words of students returning from Immersion experiences I oversee, to Israel/Palestine and Cuba. Those had been on my list since the end of January. I tended final details for this week’s writing circles, with our semester coming to a close. My list of tasks requiring immediate attention thinned, and empty spaces met my eyes on the page. Dinnertime arrived, and I basically went tharn. [Watership Down reference, btw]. I’d had a cocktail the night before, so I didn’t want to make myself a drink. We tried for take-out from Christopher’s but could not get through on the phone. We baked chicken breasts and steamed broccoli. We tried a NetFlix show that has been all the rage—Tiger King—and I got angry watching it. Especially as my husband gaffawed and howled in some places. I was entering into a world where I could not seem to find any humor at all.
I’ve learned enough to know that when I’m at a deadend night like that, I just go to bed. Make the day end. Poured my hot bath. Read a little bit of something I cannot remember now. Turned off the light. So this morning is a new day…?
I laughed when I got my Screen Notification Summary on Sunday. “Your screentime has increased 61%”. That doesn’t even count the Zoom or computer hours. Ooph. I know I’m going ‘there’ in hopes of feeling connected, grounded, in relationship with those I love. It does give me a place to encourage, to cheer on my CF peeps, to participate in what our ‘communal life’ has to be in this time. Yet the screen is not where I can feel alive… I need to begin to trust that those relationships will all be there when I come out of this, on the other side...regardless if I do anything helpful at all...
The experience of these recent hours has not been unlike running full speed into a wall. I am stopped. I feel halted, somehow. Stuck in amber, even. My mind continues to race with all the things I know should lighten my spirit, my heart—a Paris puzzle I have out, two knitting projects, my SoulCollage table, a couple fiction series I’ve wanted to start, working out (today at noon, so I could have something to look forward to).
I have a couple ‘intentional containers’ I’ve started, to hold some of this time—Julia Cameron’s Walking in this World and Tarot of the Spirit, the book to interpret the deck I got for Christmas—in addition to those I’m already blessed with in my life. I am through Week One of Cameron’s book. And I’m to the Ten of Fire, for learning the deck/familiarizing myself with its insights/invitations. CrossFit continues to be the steady anchor in my life, both with daily workouts and text/FB nudges from coaches and friends. I continue to touch in daily with my spirit-friend, Lisa, who holds such beautiful space for me and my best-self. It’s hard to not see her, be with her, as much as we have been accustomed to in our circle-work together. But she feels close, no matter what. Brian and I have opened into some new rhythms—some contemplative practice, daily walks in the Preserve—and we are increasingly patient with one another. Yet I simply couldn’t DO last evening somehow. And the months of evenings to come?
I have known how to pull myself out of depression or the doldrums for decades, and yet this time, I’m just not feelin’ it. I know I can will myself into these activities. I know I can use these activities to distract and busy myself away from this simmering rising water inside…
…but what if the gift of this quarantine bunker-time for me, for those I love, is to let the water simmer? To let it rise? How do I stay still to receive or to tend what is coming my way? Others’ callings at this time will be different—those with children, those working the front-lines of things—so what is my Invitation from the Universe that I’m still too afraid or shell-shocked to open…?
