Another blogger summed it up in a post called “Our Collective Exhaustion.” Patricia Pearce writes, ‘The body-blows that the daily news delivers are almost more than we can handle. Day. After day. After day. After day. It has been relentless.’
She goes on to say that our exhaustion comes from trying to hold back the inevitable:
Continue readingThe first stay-home directives I remember came with a date that seemed impossibly far away. Three whole weeks! That date was today, April 4. Now the orders, or certainly our intentions, stretch into the unknown future. Staying at home has become the new normal.
As the first-hand reports come in from the front lines, this order does not seem burdensome. Continue reading
Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in its petty pace from day to day.
Yesterday I taught Ben how to bake bread. He is now in favor of baking all our bread, just as the stores are running out of flour.
Yesterday I made masks for the family, custom fitted to each of our shnozzes. Vic’s was a challenge. They may reassure our neighbors that we won’t cough on them, but I doubt we’ll wear them on walks unless we get The Directive. Continue reading
Sometimes I experience the Christian season of Advent as an artificially imposed waiting period. Like, you will get Christmas if you sit quietly for four weeks. Let’s all patiently wait for the Baby Jesus to be born though this actually happened several thousand years ago and we go through this every year. This season of waiting, of course, is completely countercultural. We are surrounded with Get ready! Buy now!
This year, however, the decision to sponsor an asylum seeker has given new meaning to Advent as a waiting period. Continue reading
It is amusing and a bit mysterious how I reach a set point when it comes to taking on things. I am willing and willing and doing and doing and then suddenly—too much. Something pushes me over my limit. The French have a word for this: le comble, the ultimate, the “too much,” the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Continue reading
A pretty but too early snow falls in my birthday week. Global warming, they say? Well, the snow is falling on autumn leaves that are still attached to trees. Trees used to always be bare by my birthday. In recent years they hang on at least two weeks longer than before. So what does it mean when fall comes later and snow comes earlier?
The key is that it is unusual. Nothing is normal. Or, the new “normal” is change and disruption. Unpredictability is an ambiguous gift for my birthday. Continue reading
Getting the documents together to apply to sponsor an asylum seeker is as complicated as applying for a visa for Congo, a process that always daunts me though I’ve been through it countless times.
The sponsor application was complicated by a last-minute switch in who was being sent to us, complicated by notarization required for one document, complicated by the local coordinator sending jpegs to include in our application that were too small to be readable and having to resend them, complicated by forgetting to include said documents and having to go back into the house to get them, complicated by forgetting my wallet when I did go to the post office and having to go back home to get it, complicated by having to pay more than expected to send a package that will arrive later than expected because the P.O. “doesn’t deliver overnight to some places,” one of them being a border county in New Mexico where said asylum seeker is waiting for deliverance from a detention center into our charge. Continue reading
I’m doing better now that I’ve come to terms with the dark cloud hovering over my head: my late mother and my own mortality. Still, there are days when I can’t do more than one or two things. The weather is that cold-rain, almost-snow deep fall gray more typical of November than October and I literally feel “under the weather” a lot of the time. Sad weather weighs me down. I hibernate and don’t get enough exercise. A head cold threatens despite daily doses of immunity boosters.
But today I made a rather momentous decision. Maybe that is my one thing for today because decisions can be taxing, right? Continue reading
My family in about 1948
I will soon be 75. This is not old by today’s standards, and most of the time I do not feel old, but if I survive until mid-November I will have exceeded my mother’s lifespan. She died eleven days before her 75th birthday. Continue reading
There was a little gathering Sunday afternoon that meant a lot to me. It was a gathering of cousins on my mother’s side and a few members of the next generation as well. It was not a big, all-day family reunion; just a few hours of reminiscences over ice cream and other goodies including Grandma Kauffman’s date pudding.
It was significant because it never happens, even though many of us live within an hour of each other. Continue reading
the practical mystic 