I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how it must have been for Europeans during the first and second world wars. Every day filled with uncertainty. Horrible things happening to people you know and to strangers. Bombs falling. Soldiers fighting. Occupation. Fear. Horror. Pain. Death. Hunger.
Most of us in our country have never faced such
Dark Days
in our lives. (Though if you grew up Black, in poverty, or are an immigrant or a soldier your story may be quite different and you probably have a better understanding of living in dark days.)
Thinking about other dark times makes what I am facing right here, right now, seem small and insignificant. Yet if I was a health care worker in our hospitals I would be facing day after day of not enough staff, fear of getting sick or making loved ones sick, never-ending fatigue, and watching people too many people die without their loved ones near and more.
Dark days indeed.
But there are also
Silver Linings
Though the news seems dire and many are suffering job loss, trauma, illness, and exhaustion, I and almost all my friends and family are all okay. I am privileged. Some days I feel something akin to survivor guilt because in many ways these days have been wonderful for me.
I cannot remember a time in my life when I have had more time to create and write or spent more time to spend out in nature. Writing my daily blog posts has been a joy (most days). And as an introvert, while I miss getting together with close friends and family I am enjoying the freedom of choosing to focus on creating. What I miss most are hugs and spending time with our grandchildren. I hope that when this is over I can give and receive lots and lots of big wonderful hugs from family and friends.
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.
— Walt Whitman
I have heard friends say that they love the freedom of these times because they are not going somewhere all the time. One friend said, “These are best days of my life.” (Note, I no longer work nor do most of my friends so our experience of these times is quite different from many others’ experiences.)
Everyday art
What gets me through each day is a combination of intentionally seeing the world through eyes of wonder, the beauty of nature even in this dark time of year, and the love I have for family and friends that doesn’t dim with distance or separation.
Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future. Here is all the developing greatness of the dream of the world, the pure flash of momentary imagination, the vision of life lived outside of triumph or defeat, in continual triumph and defeat, in the present, alive. All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.
— Muriel Rukeyser
What silver linings have you discovered in your life during this time of pandemic?
May you walk in beauty.
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