Beautiful book. A gift from my Sun. Visiting one another through something called “Zoom.” Living through a Pandemic. (I shake my head, smile and chuckle settling down in as much of that reality as I am able to.). Ten months of masks, social distance, deaths and sickness. Confusion, division, riots, economic meltdowns, and somehow continuing through a day to the next “a day.”
Losing the structure of time as a week, a weekend, a month. Losing the bookmarks of time like birthdays, weddings, barbeques, lunch breaks, Saturday visits with friends. Watching a movie with someone. Meeting for coffee. Hanging out in Thrift stores and book stores. Riding the bus and train with other people who are also going “somewhere.”
Having so many curtains pulled back on the price we paid as a society that slowly and surely upended all that has real value and replaced it with things that can’t stand on their own, after all. Money, property and prestige cannot solve life for anyone. Money, property and prestige rendered powerless to enable living beyond what the inhabitants of our plant are experiencing. No free passes on wearing a mask. No free passes on having to social distance or wash hands over and over again. The Great Leveler came.
From the doctors and nurses straight to the people who mop the floors of our hospitals and those who wheel chairs and stretchers to and from all forced into a whole new area of risk and burden on top of the ordinary risk and burden inherent in their roles … we took you for granted and we need you as we did before, but we believe we need you now more than ever.
The public school teachers barely making a truly livable wage now asked to save our children … suddenly seen as “essential” … Folks working in Dollar Tree, Walmart, Burger King, McDonalds, Rite-Aid, CVS … seen as schlepps and used as a gratitude barometer for ‘gee, so glad I don’t have to do That for a living’ … Now Essential Workers. Not a dime more. Mail carriers, truck drivers, bus and subway drivers … Essential.
The “Great Leveler”… the CEO, the PhD, the celebrity, the financial wizards; joining in the masses looking for “PPE,” washing and washing and wringing their hands. Can’t “status” or “buy” a pass out of here. Now.
One per cent of the population accounting for forty per cent of all the deaths: “old” people relegated to nursing homes, long-term care facilities. The upside down value system of our country … blinding us to the reverence and gratitude their wisdom deserves. We want to live longer; busting our collective asses at every level to make that happen … and when folks get there, they find themselves alone. Unable to stay in their home. Families off here and there; busy living and striving … Will they find themselves alone too?
Are we learning? Are we waiting to be able to “return” to what was? Are we willing? Can we recognize the good that has remained? Are we grateful for what has been mercifully left to us: our free will to choose? To decide anew? To see that whatever has sustained us through this time, really sustained us, has come from within? Had come to us from another “within?”
I don’t’ imagine I’m so very different from many or any of my brothers and sisters. I recognize my brothers and sisters. I have so much love in my heart. I cannot really say I had to work hard to find ways to express it during the days when the world turned upside down.
Faith & Roses 
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