The clouds and light this morning colluded to from this impressionistic photo of the Tuckahoe River. It looks as if I've used some sort of filter or edit function, but I don't even know how to do that. The photo describes how I've felt the past few months-murky, dark, the line between reality and fantasy unclear. Every day a step out into a world in which I am a stranger. Waiting, waiting.
Can it be that we will make it thru the pandemic? That we will go to the grocery without fear, sing together, hug our loved ones? Hope is drifting in around the edges-a quiet mystery that I feel it yet don't quite trust. The anxiety that waiting brings seems all the more intense.
And yes, there have been silver linings to this enforced time of isolation. Less rushing, more time for reading and gardening, gentle evenings with my husband. I want to carry these forward as we go back to "normal."
Our world is reeling from so much loss. Let us practice compassion and work for the common good, sustained by what unites us.
Days pass when I forget the mystery
Problems insoluble and problems offering
their own ignored solutions
jostle for my attention, they crowd its antechamber
along with a host of diversions, my courtiers, wearing
their colored clothes; cap and bells.
And then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything, anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
Creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.
"Primary Wonder" by Denise Levertov
