I made this image several years ago. Am looking forward to flowers, bumble bees, and butterflies
As these days of the pandemic stretch before and behind us I realized that I am beginning to feel survivor guilt. I am not on the front lines risking my life. Because we are retired, we have not lost jobs and we have a steady source of income. Our adult children are doing well mostly working from home. While they have had their hours and pay cut they are all right. We are among the privileged.
In many ways I am thriving in our stay-at-home world. The introvert in me is reveling in the freedom of stretches of days without anything in my calendar. Yet I feel as if I should be doing something more to help.
A Tension of Opposites
The gap between those who are doing well and those who are struggling keeps getting bigger. Reading Katrina Kennison’s blog post yesterday, I felt as if she was saying all of the things I’ve been thinking and feeling. I wish I wrote as beautifully and gracefully as she writes. Reading her blog posts is always a treat.
It is one thing to linger at the breakfast table reading the grim news, trying to comprehend the staggering reality of nearly forty thousand Americans dead, three hundred million under stay-at-home orders, twenty-two million filing for unemployment. Not to mention the desperation, fear, suffering, and gross federal incompetence that underlie those terrible numbers. It’s quite another to experience that horror and grief first hand. I don’t personally know anyone who’s died. I’ve not been required to risk my own life. I won’t lose my home. And yet, even so, I dream dark, disturbing scenarios of infection and distress. My heart feels heavy, tender, as if swollen with some chronic inflammation of sadness that is both mine and not mine to bear.
— Katrina Kennison blog post
North Shore Sunrise (2011)
There is a dissonance between the great joy I feel from observing the beauty of the world and from creating, and the grief and aching I feel in my heart for all of the suffering and loss that so many are experiencing. I cannot help rejoicing that spring is here. My heart soared Saturday when I went out on my bike for the first time in several years. I soaked up the sensations of movement, air, beauty, and sheer joy at the world greening and beginning to come alive with the colors of springtime.
And in this moment, I’m challenged to somehow hold both the anguish of so many others and, too, to be fully present here, at the end of another quiet, uneventful day. I’m trying to pay attention to what’s right in front of me. And I also feel guilty about all of it.
— Katrina Kennison blog post
This is life
I just keep breathing through all of the good, bad, joy, and sadness. The only way that I’ve found through all this is radical acceptance of the whole tangle of feelings. Practicing loving-kindness meditation has been especially comforting for me lately. Sending out love and kindness to everyone fills me with peace.
There is much to grieve in our battered world, and yet it seems that every poignant reminder of our own mortality is also an invitation to notice how much we usually take for granted, and to become ever more aware of life’s preciousness, its impermanence, its beauty.
— Katrina Kennison blog post
How about you? Are you feeling a tension of opposites?
“I don’t think of all the misery, but of the beauty that still remains.”
― The Diary of a Young Girl
May you walk in beauty.
Pink Lady Slipper at Minnesota Landscape Arboretum (2012)
I miss going to the sunken garden at Como Conservatory when it’s all dressed up for spring and summer.
0 Comments