I woke up with the memory of an August day in 2013 and felt the tender touch of the fragments of the dream from my old apartment on the far side of town.
Echoes from the past in which I remembered reading that a smart Virgo should listen to the Taurus for they could heal each other and then I opened my eyes.
Two cellphones lay on the night stand next to the machine that is supposed to ensure I keep breathing through the night.
And I thought about the end of the longest fucking March anyone alive has ever experienced and wondered how long before we walk out our doors and get to make like the boy and the older girl in JoJo Rabbit.
Sometimes people hear music even when others do not.
Two Lonely Persons
Thought about integrating Rilke’s quote about two lonely persons into this and weaving a tale of the unexpected connections people make and how strong those bonds can be.
Brother Pablo would approve, he would tell you in English and Spanish of the importance of fostering such things and how you fan such flames, oh yes he would.
Rilke would agree, he would add his words and the weight of his experience to something more profound than talking about the preference of a red or a blue dress.
It might be something like this:
“Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
We’re going to have to storm walk our way through this present and figure out how to get to the other side in many cases without confidence in the federal or state leadership.
We’re going to have to dance in the fucking fire and find the courage to battle the silent whispers of insecurity and doubt that suggest we might not have enough to get there.
Maybe it is because we have preexisting conditions that we reckon weaken our response to the virus or maybe it is because we think this virus is really good at what it does.
Or at least it is good when we don’t understand it as well as we will and haven’t developed tools and resources for dealing with it.
For now it makes a good villain in a science fiction flick because you cannot reason nor negotiate with it. Can’t scare it in submission with threats of destruction so we are going to have to confront it.
Been thinking a bit about my great-grandparents and how they might have responded. Been thinking the fear might be familiar to them and yet maybe overblown in some respects because this wouldn’t have felt as shocking.
But then again quite a bit of what has thrown some of us for a loop wouldn’t have hit them the same way because their lives were different than ours.
I rather imagine that if they or others from their time were magically transported into the present they would wonder why and how we managed to blow preparing for this in such a foolish manner.
They would be able to say we have known for years another pandemic could threaten us all and that we definitely knew this one would make its way from across the sea to here and ask why we didn’t do more.
And we’d have no good answer.
My teens will tell you I am famous for saying you can’t hide from some things and that life is tough all over.
And most of the time that is my attitude, but if you want my real confession it is that I would like to hide.
I’d like to set sail for some remote place or set up shop in some remote mountain hideaway and wait to hear this is cleared up.
It is a nice thought to think of being somewhere far away where I don’t wonder or worry about my surroundings.
If life emulated movies that might be how it went. I might grab those I care most about and spirit them off for an extended vacation on Wilner’s Ark or some ranch far away.
But apparently that is not how it works or my life likes to emulate dramas, action and disaster movies so here we are.
Maybe not dead center of the worst of it, but definitely placed where it is not hard to be exposed if you aren’t careful.
So we’ll face it head on and do our best because there are no other options.
“Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final”
― Rainer Maria Rilke
