The almost-post-pandemic cliché question arose at a gathering I attended online, the spiritually-minded people each at home cross-legged on cushions. I sat more comfortably on a couch. Recently, my nerves have been bundled and frayed at the ends like severed electrical wires. When someone posed the question, I was understandably afraid of catching on fire. All year long, I’ve been putting my best face forward, seeking out opportunities for in-person visits at a safe distance, joining groups on Zoom in the hopes of learning something, of feeling connected to a world I can’t touch anymore and can barely see. I use the telephone like I used to in the ancient history of my youth, when phones attached to the wall were all we had. Back then, all long-distance conversations were faceless. “What good has come from this pandemic year for you?” Which face on the screen had asked this? My eyes were closed when the voice needled, soft-toned and sincere, into my ear. Now my whole body tensed, some master switch tripped off inside me. I couldn’t feel a thing. But I was wearing my best face. Not my less-than-optimal face, my dysphoric face, my reasonable-to-be-indignant-and-full-of-rage-at-the-world face: they held perfectly still. Perhaps my sudden stillness signaled spiritual progress, some growth in my practice of equanimity. Or, did it reveal denial of my true feelings? My resignation to the American cult of positivity? Within me, I heard myself protesting: “It’s too early for a question like that! Growth, shmowth. I’m still in this thing.” Besides, can we meaningfully describe effects of the pandemic on people as good simply because they are not horrifying, terrible, exhausting? Judging experiences as good or bad simplifies life and its richness into opaque categories. It belies complexities. “There has been so little to plan for,” I offered, when it was my turn to speak. “I have truly learned to live one day at a time, each day seeming complete within itself, a chance to live truly into the present moment.” “Like Groundhog Day!” someone chirped. Yes, absolutely. We all know the story: the plight of a cantankerous reporter caught in an idyllic town, his alarm clock flipping into action every day, the same day, at 6:00AM playing the same song. But who knows how long Bill Murray’s character lives trapped in this psychic time warp of one day repeating itself? The answer is clear: until he learns to appreciate his life, to respect and be grateful for the people he knows, to love his girlfriend. What we always seem to forget when we speak so fondly of this film is that, at a certain point in the drama, our hero takes pains to kill himself. He tries, over and over and over again. He experiments, continuing to commit suicide in alarming ways. Yet every “next” morning he wakes, incredulous. In hell, life keeps foisting itself on him. The nourishing elements of life he will become aware of later on already exist alongside the painful and defeating ones. They abide together in this day our friend wants so desperately to escape. Times of stress, of change, have always demanded I try to live one day at a time, bearing one moment at a time. That’s all we’ve got anyway, and it’s all I can handle. This year of the pandemic has been one long alarm, waking me each day to face myself, the insipid elements tangled up with the inspired. I try to take charge of my wires. I attempt to splice them with the junction boxes of patience and wisdom. What good has come out of this pandemic year for me? One more day. Karen Jessee Please offer your responses and comments below, then consider sharing this post with a friend.
If you would like to be on an email list for notifications of new posts, please email searchandknow@mindspring.com.
2 Comments
Always look for what’s missing in the ordinary places, where emptiness fills the spaces under tables, inside lampshades, on shelves and the unused cabinets up too high in the kitchen. Nothing is there there, but it isn’t supposed to be. Negative spaces hold up the positive like an armature supports the sculpture from within. We have to have them. Still, I hate—no, I detest—the negative spaces, deep holes of loss where my feelings go, where my ability to feel goes. Under the table felt like privacy when I was a child, but now the pen rolls under, the bracelet, the slip of paper with an important quote, a positive one meant to bring things to light. Under a table is where they go missing. Into the negative spaces is where I go missing. So, how to find myself? How to reach between the cushions shoving my hand down for the paperclip of grief? I need something to hold me together. I need something to bridge the positive and negative spaces, the functional and laid flat by feelings. Perhaps feelings are not a place of being lost. Perhaps they are the armature of the life we see as a table: upright, stable, able to carry the tray where the pen, the hair-tie, and the bracelet sit, not lost at all but collected, cared for. Perhaps the positive requires negative space, covers it, protects it even. Perhaps being lost is only the shadow of being found, and they both exist together attached at the heel like Peter Pan and his shadow, the one that always tried to get away. Maybe my shadow just tries to get away. Maybe I need to chase after and insist it stay with me, securely tucked under the table where I can find it, when I need my shadow—in order to get lost within myself however much I hate to go missing. Karen Jessee Join the conversation: leave a comment. Also, please share Search and Know!
If you would like to receive an email when new posts appear, send a message to searchandknow@mindspring.org. Sweatpants don’t suit me. Never have. But people love them, especially people stuck at home for months freed from fashion standards in workplaces and public spaces. For teleconferencing, a single crisp shirt will do. That one shirt and an absence of anything too personal—handwritten notes, self-help books, a jar of Vaseline on a shelf. Nobody needs to see these. That we can even consider spending half the day half-dressed proves the engines of vanity are being retooled. Consider hair. When the pandemic began, absolutely no one was having their hair cut, not even people who could do it themselves. We were stunned. Any tending of appearance seemed petty and irreverent. Besides, it seemed impossible in our emotional state. These days, the concerns of dressing from head-to-toe have been replaced by a new vanity, one more insidious than before the pandemic. The corner thumbnail of myself in conversation on screen is like the mirror I am lucky to escape from after fixing my hair every morning. This real-time image of myself reflects my reflection to me, and I can’t help but glance… and glance… and… The distraction of wanting to and NOT wanting to see myself at the same time intrudes on conversations and strategy sessions and sincere inquiries of concern for your wellbeing. I can’t hide from my self-aware-self-consciousness anymore. Which makes me ask: what is it for—this concern for appearance and how I show up for the day, for you in that day, even if you will never know what kind of pants I’m wearing? Why get dressed? Why get all the way dressed up, tending the body, donning jewelry and a matching over-shirt, the handprinted one I found with my son when Comic-Con was in town two years ago? I dress up—even now—because I still believe looking my best gives a welcome gift to the world, even the incidental world of UPS delivery drivers and neighbors bringing their garbage bins back from the street. Yes, the world I see every day is small—family-members and the two friends who are germ pod-mates. What do they notice when they see me? They could care less what I look like! They barely notice anything. I do love them, but it’s discouraging. What’s the point of wearing a mini-skirt if no one really sees my legs? Which is the point, of course: I hope to be seen. But not only for the obvious reasons. Colorful clothes and hair held up high with a flame salmon elastic are also a way I express my appreciation for YOU, you who are beautiful however you appear, you whose smile I crave. You who will sometimes smile because of me. I miss your smile. I miss the smiles of my friends, of the familiar folks who work at the drug store, the food market, the dress shop where I used to stop in just to visit with the women, to turn and share the way my garments fall just so, just so for you, my friends, just so to celebrate our life, here, together. Now, there is so little of that. But I keep getting dressed up. I put goo in my hair to draw out the curl. And I miss you. Karen Jessee Please consider leaving a your thoughts below for other readers,
and share SEARCH AND KNOW with your friends. If you would like to receive an email notification of new posts, email me at searchandknow@mindspring.com. Some people say, “If we don’t study history, we are doomed to repeat it.” I suspect history repeats itself regardless of what we do or don’t do, how much we do or don’t understand. History offers story after story about pandemics and plagues, yet here we are in the middle of our own. Though slews of people are writing now—scientists, journalists, thinkers of all stripes—describing the broad effects of plagues throughout human history, we can’t help but feel completely shocked and surprised. But is that a reasonable response? Contemporary writers make something very clear: Just as surely as humans have affected the natural order by opening a Pandora’s Box of microbial antagonists-turned-enemies, plagues have always changed humanity. They have forced new behaviors, evoked violent confrontations, and led to long-term changes within the structure of communities. Tale-telling of our disease wars may not stop them. Nevertheless, in the hearing we can learn from our errors and oversights as a species, counterbalance our intrinsic arrogance with the humility born of knowing we can’t understand everything. We can rediscover the imperative of coming to each other’s aid while becoming more thoroughly human in the process. One very early saga of—not one but TEN—plagues experienced in succession by people more than 3,000 years ago should bring us up to date. Told in the book of Exodus, the second book of the Hebrew scriptures, the ten plagues against the Egyptians are facilitated by Moses with the intention of forcing Pharaoh to end the Israelites’ 400-year captivity as slaves. Unbelievably, it took all ten plagues to do the trick. After a dynamic build-up—including crop-eating grasshoppers, frogs (lots of them), boils that were both disgusting and painful, and the ominously gross bloodying of the Nile, which aptly foreshadowed things to come—the tenth plague salvaged the other nine’s failure to bring about cultural reform. What, finally, was different? In the last plague, people straight-up died. Not just any people either. Children died along with every other first-born in the territory. It was a mournful and miserable plague, a ruthless and unfeeling plague with its own victims peculiarly susceptible where others were spared. Why didn’t everyone die? Why only some, the beloved, the pride of the family? Whoever wrote the story of that first Passover, whoever described these events, clearly knew what could have happened—what does happen—during a plague. Condensed into one terror-stabbed night are all the elements:
I have friends who believe good will come out of this mess we’re in, that our society is in its own moment of systemic change when injustice will be struck down and a new era of reparations will begin. I wish I could feel that positive. My sense is that good and evil are racing neck and neck, and while our desire for the triumph of Beauty and Friendship and Equality and Love is nobler, it also necessitates pure faith—faith in the unseen Power that makes positive transformation possible, that draws out and nourishes the good in people which otherwise often lies obscured within. Perhaps faith is still possible. Plagues clearly do something. The author of Exodus is trying to tell us to stay at home, feed the hungry, resist evil systems of governance and unjust economies and, while wandering the pandemic’s wilderness, hammer out a more meaningful identity within your community. Eventually, after we’ve suffered a long time, we’ll find ourselves in a land rich with resources enough for all, a land worthy of the promise we cling to: God’s victory over death, health for everyone, and freedom for captives whoever they are. Karen Jessee Please leave your comments, your reflections below. Invite your friends to Search and Know!
If you would like to receive an email notice of new posts, please email searchandknow@mindspring.com. My mother always whisked at me, stop whining! That’s what they all said, the keening call of my desires unmet at three years old, and four, and five. Perhaps if love had listened, eyes lent for one certain moment, my pleadings would have found their rest, my voice settled like cooling water in our stovetop kettle. Remember the urgency of that whistle? I shrieked like that. These days, I feel like a child again. I pout until I am sick, helpless with rage as I cry out, Deliver us, Lord! Spare us the trial! For some, grief brings tears-- grace restoring balance deep in the blood, bringing temperatures down. But not for me. I am intolerably hot. People say, nothing is wasted with God. The way I’m steaming, I fear I will evaporate into nothingness, leaving no one to whine the necessary complaints, Angel of Death, pass over! Free us, Lord! Losing that voice would be a waste at any age. Karen Jessee ******* Please offer your reflections by leaving a comment below, and invite your friends to visit Search and Know.
If you'd like to receive an email notification of new posts, email me at searchandknow@mindspring.com. |
Details
Archives
April 2021
Categories
All
|