The sky is just so blue.
Spring is happening in Texas even though nobody is really watching; the Earth needs neither our permission nor our attention to do what She does best. The bluebonnets have come up, blanketing the roadsides even though so few cars fly by. Trees have exploded into flower, which even sheltering in place we Austinites are acutely aware of as the pollen count makes life miserable just like it does every year. My car’s hood is coated with bright green oak pollen. There suddenly seem to be bugs everywhere. We might not have any idea what day of the week it is but we all know it’s Spring.
Rainy days are hard, stuck inside, weather and mood sliding into a grey puddle on the ground. The gravity of what’s happening presses down and leaves me feeling pinned to the floor. On sunny days it all seems much more manageable, even if all I do is look out the window at a world of crazy-vibrant greens and oh, the blue sky.
I avoid the news.
It started as a twice-a-day limit – I’d let myself check local news ONLY in the morning and at night. But enough of the national idiocy creeps in – those circle-jerk “press conferences,” catastrophe profiteering, completely unnecessary shortages of equipment and supplies. God, how we must look to the rest of the world. I know what it looks like from in here, and it’s so enraging, so depressing, I can’t deal with it anymore. So, for now, I stop clicking on links. I mute words and users all over the place. I have to stay sane. My meds are holding me together really well and I’m not risking that just to spend my days and nights poisonously angry at everything.
I am not a productive quarantista or whatever the nonsense influencer parlance is these days. I am not making progress on any of my projects, and in fact I’ve stopped even looking at them. I’m not learning a language, I’m not taking up a new hobby, I’m not forcing myself into extra productivity when productivity obsession is part of how we got here. If I feel like making or doing something, I do it; if I feel like sleeping the day away, I do that. I am working from home with my day job which gives me both a paycheck and some structure to my days, and I am grateful for both of those things. I realize what a privilege it is not to be terrified about money right now.
I am also grateful that I don’t have children. Sweet lord.
There are no rules, no proper reaction to something unprecedented. You can’t screw up something that’s never happened before. There’s no right way; there’s only the way that gets us through.
We’re all grieving what we knew and doing the best we can and maybe for you that means baking sourdough or learning guitar, but for me it means…well, apparently it means blogging again, ordering cold brew by the gallon, and listening to lofi hip hop radio – beats to study/chill to on Youtube. Next week it might mean finally starting a morning yoga practice or rereading the Harry Potter books. I have no idea. I’m pretty sure it’ll involve naps regardless.
A seedling pushing up through the soil has no idea what the world looks like. It doesn’t know what it’s getting into. Will there be enough rain? Will the sun be too harsh here and burn it to a crisp before it’s six inches tall? Is this a sidewalk crack or a meadow? The only way to know is to move toward the unknown. None of us really know what the world is going to look like when we poke our faces out again. We just have to take it one painful, scary inch at a time, and as Anna sings in Frozen 2, “Just do the next right thing.”