A time for softness
Hi friends,
This past Sunday, Galen and I sat down and made a daily schedule for our days in quarantine. For ourselves, for the kids. How we’d divide the day, what we’d call the various blocks of time, which online resources we’d enlist to give our kids something approximating a school day, from home.
I got so wrapped up in laying out the details of my own daily schedule that I forgot to order groceries. The next morning when my alarm went off at its new time, I did not get out of bed. My enthusiasm for enrichment with my kids lasted roughly one day, because I was unprepared for the constant tide of emotion that’s keeping me from focusing on any one thing for very long.
Tears have been consistent:
-A pity party for myself, because my kids don’t listen when I tell them it’s time to do art. Or journaling. Or baking projects. Or anything, really, other than screen time.
-Some sobs for medical professionals and others on the front line, who are having to process all of this at a much more intimate level than I am.
-Some angry tears at all of our country’s ugly shortcomings.
-Crying for my kids, who need to wrestle and sweat and throw their arms around their friends.
I’ve spent the whole week softening, thinking less about schedules and enrichment and more about getting through the day with a glimmer of joy, however that looks. A few moments that have pulled me through -
Watching the boys careen down the driveway in “their car” - a laundry basket taped to a skateboard.
We put a tablecloth on the table and lit candles at dinner one night. At the end of the meal, we all tied the cloth napkins on our heads and cackled.
I helped my son make a parachute from a plastic grocery bag and watched his glee at launching it off the porch.
Gathering with neighbors for socially-distant coffee in the middle of our street.
Reading beautifully crafted writing on a germane topic - how people cope in disaster.
No matter how you’re walking through this disaster, it’s overwhelming right now. I hope everyone reading has been able to soften in the face of something so hard. Maybe it’s just the thing we to get through.
XO
Leigh
More Than Enough, by Marge Piercy
The first lily of June opens its red mouth.
All over the sand road where we walk
multiflora rose climbs trees cascading
white or pink blossoms, simple, intense
the scene drifting like colored mist.
The arrowhead is spreading its creamy
clumps of flower and the blackberries
are blooming in the thickets. Season of
joy for the bee. The green will never
again be so green, so purely and lushly
new, grass lifting its wheaty seedheads
into the wind. Rich fresh wine
of June, we stagger into you smeared
with pollen, overcome as the turtle
laying her eggs in roadside sand.