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A Season of Change

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The last year has been challenging for me. To move, to sit, to walk felt like a sword was stuck straight into my hip joint with the pain travelling down into my knee and like a true baroque expression of torture becoming a strip of fiery shin splint.
I am an active person emotionally fed by physical challenges. I have managed my Airbnb single handedly for 12 years going as much as ten months without a day off. My garden was so magnificent that people who inevitably stop to smell the roses which I kept tall so the elderly would not have to bend down for the perfume.
But then COVID hit and I folded my dreams and plans like an ivory ribbon fan and stuck them away in a drawer. It was useless to pretend. The choices of denial, or angry resistance have never been something I am drawn to. I know how to wait out the shit storm in periods of disaster. You get that skill when you are over 70 or you risk looking like an imbecile toddler throwing a fit into the faces of innocent people caught in your spewing inability to absorb the vicissitudes of life. After a certain number of decades one should learn that the elevator goes up and it goes down sometimes even getting stuck for no reason.

Working with Ego

So I stayed home and turned inward dedicating myself to learning, reading, studying and coaching my clients. In October 2021 when I went on the surgical hip replacement list I had finally lowered my proud head and given up on toughing it out.
The entire year has been one of deep and abiding growth. Submission to what is was all I could do. My choice was to deepen my grounding practices or to thrash around in the net of constraint I was now caught within.
When it came to me as a metaphor I thought of it as “the last firing” of a piece of pottery. I had been glazed and now I would see my true colors appear.
There were days when as I struggled out of bed the first thing I would do would be to weep. It wasn’t vigorous athletic/dramatic/theatrical sobbing but more of just a leaking out of grief.
I was 77, 78, 79 and isolated from real life contact with others because I was minutely aware down to the smallest detail carved with statistics that my age cohort had no room for stupid.
The deepest lesson that I received was that I am fully, inexorably and fucking human. My emotions would arise and I had to make choices. Would this hour be one of wise decisions, resignation, or of internal vitriolic debate of self with self?
I kept my compass out. I kept coming back to the question: Who do you want to become?
And what I mean by that is not how do I present to others, or how much status or power I can accumulate. What I kept returning to was the pottery metaphor. My clay was being thrown about by hands other than mine. I was being burnished, polished, placed in a fiery kiln of apparent chaos and something was happening to me.
The consistent restrictions on movement, the chronic pain, the disengagement from groups, from normative behavior, the Egregore of society was a full on attack from all sides.
This is not particularly extraordinary to my life. Most people in the last three years have had their contract with life put in the shredder. We have all stood and watched it cut into thin strips.
It became so very clear to me that I had little understanding of what depression does in a life. Because I was used to enduring, I came to see that this very habituation to the dissociative state was my greatest scarring from my childhood. I had no urge to paint, to write, to send in poetry or stories. I was used up in not allowing despair to eat me alive.
“How long,” I asked myself, “How long have you gone to ground, become frozen and paralytic when you are in pain?”
And then I remember where it came from. As a toddler if I cried, I would be attacked physically. As a child in school I would have the “silliness” slapped out of me if I looked sad. So now I was deep into the initial wound.

at 4 years old

By nature, I think I am quite stoic but there was also a large part of the residual scarring in my experience of cruelty under the age of 6. It was violently taught to me that I had no rights to host the demons of negative emotions. Only my parents could be angry.
I could see how deep in ran in me. But now in this retreat in the hermit cave I faced the fact that I had to forgive myself for everything that made me human.
I am still and have been in pain for a year. Because of that, I will be triggered into the helplessness of no rescue in my early years. Who will protect me? Who will make it stop? There is no one.
But I have me now. And I have given myself permission to shut down and just tend to my body. I have given myself permission to see the victories I have achieved that don’t shine out into the world. They are private between me and me. All of it is the clarity of seeing how strong I have made myself.
And now it all changes. I am going through three surgeries in a month. I am promised a new hip.
So many of my ancestors were knights. They knew about battles, self discipline, stoicism and skill in the face of the enemy. I know my enemy has been my own ego and I feel the ancestors in me as I have faced the lesson these past three years. The sturdy warriors had the wisdom to leave old wounds and battles behind and trained for the next battle. They have much to teach me.

 

 

The knights in my ancestry

 

 

Reconnecting with My Past Identity

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I awoke at 4 am with a hard sore spot behind my ear. Since my eyes are not on two fleshy protuberances, I cannot swing them around to see what it is. I suspect I have just experienced my fourth spider bite this year. The poisonous brown recluse was apparently able to shed its shyness long enough to crawl down my shirt and leave its acid flesh-eating gift on my back. I immediately called the doctor and began antibiotics and antibiotic creams. The brown crater of dead flesh is a permanent testimonial to the beast’s intention. Next, within weeks, I attracted a black window bite and took precautions quickly.

I used to be on fire

This last one surprises me. There is some form of Jack London survival short story about how a spider found me at night, crawled into my hair, and settle on a place behind my ear to attack.

I thought about why these events all happened in a few weeks and then just let it go. I am, after all, a mere mortal. I cannot know the intent of the Spider Gods.

I am preparing for surgery #2 and #3 as I limp around the house using my time travel mind to imagine what I will need next to me in the future.

Oh, I think. I forgot to select the poems for the October poetry reading online. I interrupt my slow hobble around the house and sift through the piles of poems I have printed up. Too many computers have died taking years of creations with them for me to any longer trust them. But the paper is reassuring.

As I sift through the poems I am surprised.

“These are good,” I think.

I had forgotten myself in the small, quiet life since 2021. I had forgotten that words of intimate intensity would flow through me into my writing. I had forgotten standing on a stage performing my poems and having people say, “You frightened me. I was shaking. I cried.”

Intensity of beauty

So I am curious as to the layers of the self. This Victorian housekeeper with weak eyes pulling aside a curtain to observe others on the street is not the same presence as the Tank Girl Punk poet, is she?

Or is the mistake I have made about myself that the chaotic passion of my words and the days of reclusive, shy silence are both aspects of “the self”?

Even holding those poems in my hands and reading them reminds me that there is the fire inside me. It feels good. I have not felt its heat for 1,723 days, but who is counting?

fearless expression

I move past the spider bites, the year of stabbing hip pain, and the deep isolation into the next transfiguration of my identity. It is complex, multilayered and dynamic.

Let It Rip!

September is Gently Leading

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September has an agenda. It begins to shut us down. Because it is cooler, we close the doors and windows. We begin the transition. I found the summer’s relentless pounding heat unpleasant. If I had wanted to live in Death Valley, Algeria or Iraq, I would have purchased a ticket and packed my body armour sunscreen.

We were protected this year from the toxic air lung destruction of past years. The fires were mostly far away. Because only other people suffered, I did not have to think of it. The flooding of past years that washed away the highway and isolated communities was not part of our story this year. Because only other people suffered, I did not have to think of it.

And then at the end, as if to remind us not to celebrate too soon the toxic air floated in for a week to obscure the hills, obstruct the breathing and send us indoor with windows firmly closed.

It fascinates me how my defacto setting is “separation.” Not me is the first message on my assessment dial. I observe myself following the stone path laid out for me by my culture. The lines, the boundaries, the subsets of reality so carefully drawn that rule my thoughts.

September is not summer. It is more contemplative, reclusive, and harder to know. Is it predictive, is it compliant with some nature Gods that rule the universe?

We just sit back and observe it. It is like driving on a highway and going up into the hills. Will there be fog, ice, and danger around the corner?

The volunteer pumpkin lantern plants were profuse this year. The blackberries baked on the bushes. The grapes began well but were eaten by the animals living under my shed. Everywhere around me I see that there is no probable outcome. It is a game of chance this living on the earth.

I watch September’s days expecting some form of climate insanity to manifest. I do this to protect myself. I want to be ready for whatever happens next that I can’t possibly know. That pattern of logic is the very definition of instability.

 

Where are you taking us September? What next?

Do I Trust Myself? Do I Trust the Universe?

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I spend each morning with teachers, books, YouTube, Gaia and continue to absorb information. Frequently, it seems like a visit to Bed Bath and Beyond and seeing a new device I had never imagined previously.

“Oh,” I think, “that would make cooking easier.”

My path in years past was about stubbornness, refusal to adjust my steps, following the only map I had access to without stopping to sit and ask, “What am I not seeing?”



The last year has been a time of stripping away. Because my hip joint has failed, the simplest physical effort has to be executed like I am climbing a rock face. To get out of bed, I talk my way through the actions of my legs, the alignment of my knees, the seeking security in my feet for the great push upwards. If I try to ‘accomplish’ tasks physically, I may well find myself down on my carefully constructed incline of pillows until I recover.

I am in a state of struggle with the frequent feeling of being overwhelmed by pain. I float hopelessly depleted with the ache, lost to who I once was, grieving for the time of excitement for the hunt after the forms of success that I could capture and bring home.

Now, I repeatedly say to myself, “trust.”
It has become a prayer.

I am careful with every movement. I am delicate with my thoughts. It would be so easy to turn on myself and screech like a harridan at this creature I have become.

“When will my life begin again?” I ask myself.

almost done



I have been so depleted that I no longer have dreams. I suppose because a stretch of sleep is so hard to enter with the joint firing sirens of pain, I am reluctant to use it up in mere visions.

I imagined a figure stroking my hair once when I fell asleep on the couch. She touched me with such gentle love that I felt it through my entire body.
When I woke up, I thanked her and I thanked myself for seeing comfort rather than following the path of anger or frustration.

One thing I have had fall on me like a boulder suddenly appearing on the road in front of my car, is the realization that I cannot know what happens next. The truth I am facing is that the old rewards that programmed me are not available and it is up to me to understand. It is up to me to grow up.

“What are you doing?” I frequently ask myself and my answer is ,” staying calm.”

It is a skill not recognized in the old, dark ages of work addiction and outside validation. It is a prowess that creates strength within me.

Allow now



What is next? Where am I going? What project should I devote myself to?
These questions are no longer relevant. I am too tired to close my mind around them. There is no space for this doom scrolling on my screen.

To stay in the present moment takes a mage’s skill.
I have come to understand that surrender is the opposite of defeat.

The Lessons keep coming

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The last ten months have been one long lesson. My malformed hip socket which was an inheritance gave me trouble at 46 when I had to cease taking jazz dance. My hip “tore” and I could not walk so I retreated to taking only necessary steps. After six weeks, I was no longer in pain. I returned to the dance studio and within the first 15 minutes, I once again felt the pop-rip of my right hip.
It was then I went to the doctor and received the news that the cup that was supposed to provide a nice swivel surface for movement on that side was not as it should be.

And so I gave up the dance lessons I had taken since I was four. But then, as I do so well, I adjusted by forgetting. I forgot the deformation, the freedom of dancing, the joy of moving in a studio with others. It was all dropped down into the deep well of the past.


Last year, I gave up walking up hills and continued monitoring and retreating from physical activities. I said to myself it was my knee because I had forgotten.


In October I got into the surgeon and was told I needed a new hip joint. By now, I was in constant pain stabbing at the top of my leg, in my knee cap and what felt like a shin splint on fire shot down the front of my leg. Sleep was hit or miss. Sitting became impossible for extended periods of time. At first, I monitored the situation and then I gave up.


My world retracted when I had to measure out movement and could only bend myself up to get in the car one day a week. There were times when only the thought of asking for help to get out of the car drove me on to push through and manually unfold my leg.


So then the real lesson began.


I watched my emotions which wanted to explode like a burst pipe and just spray all over the inside of my mind.


Over the years since 2010, I had been wading hip deep into the swamp of my childhood prison camp. I faced, again and again, the brutality my conscious mind decided to leave behind in the land of amnesia.

I went to sit ayahuasca ceremonies, sat in a circle with Gabor Mate, and learned. I listened to teachers on YouTube, and extended my eight years of seeking various counselors into the next six years. I learned to sleep peacefully, to not struggle in the present like a fly caught in a spider web. I got deeper into my body and learned to live without the jagged knifing of fear.


But now, now I was restricted, alone, challenged, and tempted repeatedly by self-pity and anger.


Why? Why? I asked myself. And then the image came to me of the booster shot. I had vaccinated myself against despair, hidden anger, and flaring grief. But the issue of living at peace with my body was still a struggle.


My body holds pain. It holds memories of violence and broken bones. I holds memories of being choked until I passed out. It is still hidden in there. 


When I began to step further back, I could see that this ten months of chronic grinding affliction asked me to surrender. There was only one way of dealing with the sense that living was just a torment and that was to submit to what is. My ego always wants to make plans, to take action, to get back into the game of proving to myself that I am worthy. But, now, that choice is impossible.

Who am I if I am not work? Who am I if I am not action? Who am I if I don’t throw the axe of desire into the bulls eye of achievement?


My booster shot is to make me stronger. Every day I ask, “Do you trust the universe?”
My answer is always,”Yes.”


And so I release the attachment to the future as a way of pulling me out of now. I am not pulling myself white-knuckled and anxious toward someday on the calender, some promise of tomorrow. When people ask when I will have the surgery I say, “I don’t know.”

The predictable world has collapsed. And so the last vestiges of my work addiction fall away. 

One cannot tidy up during an earthquake. One cannot focus on an unformed future during a period of chaotic destruction. I remind myself to come back to now.


I sit on the deck this morning knowing my hip will soon refuse to allow me to sit much longer. I hear the birds sing around me and am grateful for the cool wind before the blasting heat of a full-on day.


I am not assessing or monitoring how I am doing. It is the last stage of recovery from work addiction. It is the last stage of leaving behind patterns and habits that blocked me from being fully present.


I did not pay for this lesson or go to a retreat in the mountains for this shedding time. It came to me. I won’t get a certificate on glossy paper with a golden seal. I will simply develop into more of who I was meant to be. 


And I trust that I am somehow growing and becoming stronger and softer as I simply allow whatever is happening to me. One day, I will understand.

The Space Between

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It has been an extended period of floating in deep, black space since I last posted. COVID came and I retreated to my tower of a bedroom high above the street. I was at first afraid. My cohort were dying off at a higher rate than any other ages so I only walked alone at night while wearing a mask.

And then the vaccine came and I gradually felt more assured that I would survive. But still I was reluctant to go into crowds or be around others. The habit of the hermit imprinted on my behavior.

I was happy to be able to go for long, extended walks under the trees and watch my neighbourhood shift through seasons. And then my world became a prison of pain. My hip failed. The joint refused to slide easily. Bone on bone with my padding sent me into months of pain. Each step was punishment.

asking the universe

The presence of COVID rising and falling out side my door, and the inability to move easily kept me isolated. Each day I sent out wishes for the prince charming surgeon to call me and invite me to the hospital to get a new hip installed.

So much has happened. Nothing has happened. I have been sitting with my thoughts trying to stay in a place of calm acceptance. It has been a difficult, challenging time. I have yearned for human closeness. I have experienced the cold howling wind without comfort of company.

I have given in to the distraction and addiction of streaming services. My life is not satisfying so I am a voyeur watching other’s narratives unfold. It has kept me numbed out and helped erase the heavy weight of time that spreads out in front of me as empty as an ocean, a desert, an arctic snowscape.

My victories are miniscule. Did I sleep? Did I eat mindfully? Did I engage in my meditation practice?

I have received recognition for my writing in two local festivals and that is a great pleasure. I have coached thirty clients to help them through the challenges of this chaotic time. And every day I have sought out the wisdom of teachers to expand my knowledge of the human condition.

To live without knowing, is the new normal. I wait. I visualize the life beyond when I can walk easily and move through the world again. I do the best I can.

 

 

What can COVID teach us?

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I was thinking today about perceived reality (again and again). For many, there has never been the sense of waiting for something ‘out there’ growing and coming closer. For many, their lives have been predictable, safe, and they believed that their survival was due to their own merit. “I did this” was a shared delusion.

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And then there are others who have known this current sense of the ominous wait, this sense of fate, the out of my control formation of some new future.
There are those who lived through the depression and knew food scarcity. My mother’s family had six children and owned 2 pairs of shoes for their offspring. Daily, everything changed as they used up their resources and had to adapt for survival.
I remember clearly sheltering at home when school was done as I watched polio spread in my home town. The pool, the movie theatre, the parks were all dangerous. I lost friends. People were deformed for life or laying in an iron lung. It was out there… the unimagined threat. It could not be controlled. And so we waited. We were careful.
As a schoolchild, we heard the school PA go on and at the yelling out of the word “flash” at random times during the day, we huddled under our metal and wood desks. Across the river was a major port. We were told, when the bombs were dropped, it would be close to us. And so we waited and ducked.
One day at noon, I walked into the vast school cafeteria and it was dead silent. We were eating lunch with dry mouths. The Cuban missile crises was underway. A teacher told me it would all happen within 15 minutes. The missiles would be released to cripple the country in which I lived. The missiles would seek out the important ports and melt the area flat. Hundreds of us sat at the tables with our knees pressed against the underside of the table tops. We remember the flash training. We ate our lunch waiting to die.
When a group of people have had an unthreatened existence there is imprinting within them. They begin to think that it is through some merit of their own that they are healthy, that they can predict their own future. And the wounding it leaves on their psyches is that it destroys their compassion. They no longer understand “the greater good.”
They have never experienced the moments of ominous waiting for something that is formulating in the moments of hung time.
Covid is bringing us back to that feeling. We suddenly see that through no fault of our own, we could cease living or for some, even worse, be the one who carries death to others around us through our actions.
We are experiencing what all of those who have lived on the face of the earth have experienced in what we call “uncertain times.” Attacking tribes, sudden famines, plagues, homeless masses of people dislodged and migrant, economic disasters are all the same experience. We are thrown out into an unpredictable world. We see that it is not our own merit that protects us and gives us a good life. We see with stark outlines that it is our ability to react to the inevitable onslaughts as a united group that is, finally, our only protection.
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Is this a time to be conflicted?

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We are between two stools, sitting on two fences, contorted into a new yoga shape that is more Chinese acrobat circus than a pose that has a name. Shouldn’t we be more clear with ourselves than just walking around the gallery of funhouse mirrors watching our projected sense of self morphing into grotesque and incredible shapes.

“That is not me,” we say.

Where do we stand when the floor is lava, the once green and calm back yard is thrust up by earthquake? Where do we stand when the very topography of our reality has changed beyond any name we could dial into our label gun? What do we believe in a time when all beliefs are suspect? Who are we when the nicely-created cattle runs that separated us no longer work? What is our purpose?

I ask who are these people around me when I see a post on social media. A friend boldly emblazons in the status space, the idea that autistic children should be killed because of the drain on society and, you know, the gene pool?

How did we get here wherever here is now? But it all changes first in the dismantling of old systems. It all changes as we have to adapt our behaviour to the new threat to our continued existence. And what I, personally, can feel right down into the marrow of me is that we are just beginning to end it.

I see in my mind’s eye the depiction of an old method of killing an individual who contravened some subtle law drafted with the hope of maintaining a structure of beliefs for some perceived goal. ‘Death by bricks’ is what comes to mind. An individual lays down and is under a board. Weights are gradually added until all the life is pressed out of the person. And for so many that is exactly what it feels like now.

The virus is not real. COVID is only in some foreign land and surely the border mark made in the invisible marker will keep it isolated to hurt only the not me people. COVID is shutting down access to the shiny distractions that have kept us running in place. The second brick is that we can no longer just run in our lives the same pathways we have always run. The third brick is the economic distress now dispersing like ink dropped in a pan of water. People are struggling with fear of the virus while some refuse to believe and are hosting happy COVID spreading demonstrations.

Alone with self

And then we are alone

We no longer have the distractions, the drug of the usual, the mindless actions that we have invested so much time and energy into the building.

And then we are alone with ourselves.

As we sit like those arrested and sent to the involuntary walls of the monastery, we endure the results of climate disruption. Thousands endure storms. Spain has snow. Earthquakes continue. Mountains, we are suddenly reminded, are volcanoes await the moment of release.

As we are like those who are trying to adapt to the weight of the bricks. We see political chaos. We see that which we cannot believe.

But we are getting better and better at absorbing shock. The concept of “It is impossible. It will never happen,” fades away.

The vaccine is created. The virus mutates. The storms throw trees through houses. The crews show up to return electricity.

The stock market keeps track of how happy the corporate rich are in any given situation. And we are envious. We are envious of their invested point of view.

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Our very sense of self erodes. Who am I when I am at home? That is a British saying I have always loved. When you are not involved in the performance art of assuming a character in the eyes of the world, who exactly are you?

When your sense of self is built in the spaces between the restrictive pillars of society, of family, of your role at work, of your star-like coming down a stairway in your costume then who are you?

As we sit at home we are mightily irritated by the sense of being conflicted, of being confused and, may the saints help us all, ignorant.

“I did not know that!” is the beginning. It is where we all become submissive to the idea that what is manifesting in the future will be unlike what our past experiences have lead us to believe was reality.

“I don’t know what all of these bricks of fear are doing to me.” We say this to ourselves as we release expectations.

Some will find it too crushing. Some will decide that it is too much to stay with the transition and to keep creating space within themselves. Some will not make it through.

But others can, at least, build their skills at surrender.

“Yes, I believe two things at once. Yes, I was wrong in my perceptions and I might be wrong even now. Yes, I allow myself to transform.”

And so the old life gets crushed out of us as we teach ourselves to stay loose. We teach ourselves to breathe deeply and not ask for assurances.

The greatest teachers for us are our ancestors. They went through periods wherein the very paradigm of reality shifted. The earth was no longer the centre of the universe. The upstart middle class refused to be slaves to the lord of the manor. Cars and horses shared the same streets. Black death, smallpox, polio swept through towns and villages. Thousands starved because of food emergencies. Wars brought the harrowing Vikings, knights, warriors that decimated the work of generations.

I look at my ancestors and know that in each of us there is the ability to survive even as the very nature of our concept of reality is destroyed. They rebuilt. Those that survived were more creative, more energized and more likely to bring forth an unforeseen future.

I look to my ancestors to understand that what is happening now is simply a new formation of something we don’t understand yet.

The bricks will not kill us. The events will not end our curiosity, our creativity and our desire to participate in a new way, in a more mindful way in the life that is arising.

Embrace the conflict. Shout loudly, “I don’t know. Yet.”

 

Lead. Make a difference.

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It is a time for us to be mindful of our words. We are called on to step into the knowing of the “reality” that we create with our postings. In the same way having one person in a neighbourhood paint a door red when there is no exterior color, and now two years later every house has a collared door, we spread social behaviours.

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If I let Neo nazi organizers entrain me to disregard health measures in the name of “freedom” then others will see the behaviour and adopt it. It is how Chris Christie ended up with COVID.
He “thought” the White House was safe. That meant he disregarded ALL medical and scientific evidence and went along with his social group in adopting behaviours. It is how mob mentality is created. It is how we adopt a mind set.
And now, I am seeing people posting statements that diminish the value of human life. Using statistics (which are changing daily) to dismiss suffering emboldens others to turn away from suffering. To disregard the loss to a family of a person as minimal loss because the person is like a “failed” product is cruelty at its sharpest. They weren’t good enough, healthy enough, young enough to survive so it doesn’t matter.
This response is being encouraged and applauded by the Neo nazi organization that has moved into our valley. The leader is best friends with David Duke. Deciding who is “valuable enough to the state to survive” is exactly the mindset of Neo nazis.
So every single time you post a diminishment of the value of human life you are like a person with a lighter walking around in fire season setting fires. I want to do it. You can’t make me stop.
I thought it was safe because all my friends did it, they will say later when the epidemic hits their household. I thought it was safe because a mob of people showed up to point my anger and fear against the very government that is trying to protect us. It is a mob mentality where calm, reasoned information is no longer trusted.
It is what Chris Christie did when he exposed himself to COVID. All my friends did it… so why wasn’t it safe.
I love Canada and the Canadian gentleness, the kindness. But to sit by and watch people encouraging the kind of behaviour that has lead to a death every 26 seconds in the USA is not the action of a responsible citizen.
I am not sorry that I speak out. We need to hold the line against a system of thought that decides that it is okay to watch a pandemic grow and take out more and more people. In the USA hospitals are slammed. Secondary causes of death are happening because there are no ICB beds available.
The vaccine is not getting to some states because the system is overwhelmed. Too many people have decided to not let others tell them how to act. And it is resulting in a death every 26 seconds.
I ask that you speak up when people tell you that the lives of others doesn’t matter until they reach a certain per centre of the population…. because as we are seeing all over the world… that very attitude is what contributes to the spreading of death.
I ask that you speak up when people say we should not protect the weak, the elderly, the homeless, the disenfranchised because somehow their death is insignificant.
Try talking to a family that has lost one member and saying, “It isn’t important. The percentages are still low.”
Sitting back silently and being “polite” will not save lives. If a person is inclined to be lead by Neo Nazi organizers think of this… you too can lead them away from that mindset. They are waiting to be lead.
Any death diminishes me. Any death weakens all of us.

What happens when we are terrified?

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Yes, we are all at sea right now. We are fighting the waves of change. When I stood in line my habit trained mind rebelled against the 6-foot rule. My body wanted to move up. Many times the clerk had to say, “Wait until you are called up.” I watched my mind. I am always curious. My habit mind reacted and I felt many things at once. I felt ashamed because I hadn’t complied with the new rule and then exactly like the child that runs my life I felt petulant and defensive. Things like,”Who are you to” and “Why are you embarrassing me” and many other responses like that of a spoiled 4 year old flashed through my mind.

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And then people became numb to the COVID threat. I haven’t experienced a loved one dying on a respirator alone in a hospital so it isn’t real for me. None of my neighbours has tested positive and had to isolate and they don’t wear masks so it must not be that bad.
I watched my mind insisting that if I had no first-hand experience with the reasons for the rules then the rules were stupid and I wanna. I wanna go out. I wanna be with people. I wanna ignore the rules and the fear and the scientific data.

I thought of the time when I was too old to be that stupid when I ate some pretty red berries on a bush outback. I ate them because I WANTED to. My mother had told me that not everything that looked like a berry was a berry and I must not put new things in my mouth.
Nobody I knew was poisoned by a beautiful red seed looking like a berry. I had never been poisoned. The danger held no personal resonance for me.

And the arguments were exactly the same as I see operative in the population right now.
I wanna eat the berries. You can’t tell me not to eat them because you are just trying to force me to follow your rules. The berries have been there for years and NOBODY (you know that person called NOBODY) has ever fallen ill.

And so I ate the berries. Swiftly within an hour, I was violently ill. It was too late to eject the poison from my stomach but I tried valiantly. I started to shake, ran a fever and finally just passed out. My mother woke me to give me more inducement to vomit yet again and forced liquid into my reluctant body.

It was a week before I could stand on my feet again.

I was 8 years old. I was old enough to know better. But the problem was I was old enough to THINK I knew better. The idea, “You aren’t the boss of me,” is not the idea of an adult.
And so we see stages of resistance around us. First is fear… if I protect myself and others that means I fear the pandemic so I choose to brazen it out.

The reason for that response is that we don’t know how to deal with fear when it arises. We push it down. We deny it. We brazenly attack it like a schoolyard bully and beat the crap out of it.

We fear to fear. We are so frightened that we are worried if we sit down with the truth of our mortality that it will make us weak.
It is the way a child thinks.

Making room for fear allows us to adapt to changes around us more easily, more fluidly and with more grace.

You must be called to the till. Now, nobody calls me to the till. You must stay back 6 feet. Now nobody stays 6 feet back. The streets are deserted, the stores shut. Now the cars run back and forth and the lines are waiting to get into the stores. The aisles are marked with directional arrows. Now the people push their carts against the demarkation of correct movement. The schools are closed. The schools are opened. The older children are sent home. The younger children are still sitting together in class.

We are conflicted as a population. We want the government to stop protecting and controlling us, we say. We don’t want anything mandated. And then a grandchild falls ill.
We see an entire family fall ill and some members die from a pumpkin carving event.” But it was our bubble,” we protest as if there is some magic in the very word.

And now we are angry at the government. Why didn’t they mandate stricter rules even though the phased-in rules have sent hundreds out into the streets without masks to spread their fury words along with the virus into the air to share.

I watch my own mind and am impressed with how immature I am. I want the rules to stay the same once I have finally learned the rules. I want the 6 feet to be enforced and the cowboys who just go any which way up a grocery aisle to stop renegading the environment.
The last step of this child-like reaction is to withdraw and trust no one.

It is like taking a driver’s test but every two weeks there is a new booklet of laws. I am confused. And it is largely a result of the culture I live within.

In places like Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand the culture has a long tradition of trusting and complying with rules.

But here, the right to do what I damned well please has to be unlearned every single time a new law is put in place. Every new behaviour shift is met with righteous indignation.
I remember my father being pissed off when he could no longer drive with an open bottle between his knees while we sat in the back of the car without seat belts and the layers of cigarette smoke flowed over my brother and I. The adults resisted every single step put in place to protect us.

It is my belief that masks will become part of our culture going forward. Pandemics are not done. We have done far too much damage to the earth, to the environment to have the “normal life” return.

A virus is a part of the ecosystem and it is reacting to the threat to all life on earth and becoming more aggressive according to Dr. Aylward an epidemiologist for WHO. Sixty per cent of all species have died in the last 20 years.

Things are changing and no matter how many people show up in the streets saying we are not at risk, viruses will not respond to public opinion.

And so my hope is that mindfulness practice will become more frequently embraced. I cannot stop fear by yelling at it, denying it, refusing to believe in it. First, I need to observe my thoughts.

Constantly, I ask myself, “What are you feeling right now?” And I ask, “What are you thinking right now?” Then I pause. I clear out everything. I stay still and I watch my 4-year-old self resisting, wanting to be special, demanding consistency and finally planting my feet on the earth saying, “But I wanna eat the pretty berries.”

There are things I don’t know and cannot know. And for those things I need to trust others to keep me safe.

Image may contain: text that says 'When you wear a mask you are saying I respect my neighbors. When you wear a mask you are saying I respect nurses and doctors. When you wear a mask you are saying I respect other people. Andrew Cuomo'