In the Family of Things

Mid August has come and gone and with it, most of summer. I used to say that August felt like one long Sunday night, especially for those of us in education. That mix of anticipation, apprehension, excitement and trepidation with September and the start of a new school year. All the stuff that can keep one awake, tossing and turning on a Sunday night, wondering what the new week will bring.

For the first time, this isn’t my felt sense. Maybe enough years out and away from the day to day. Too, knowing my work with schools has ceased, at least for the time being. Not wanting to be insensitive, I admit it’s hardly a year I’d want to be returning given so much continued uncertainty and real apprehension about the safety and well-being of staff and students as COVID-19 numbers continue to rise here and around the world with school resuming.

Despite another run this week of hot, sunny weather and cloudless skies (only the second this summer!) there are signs of what’s to come. Sitting by the local pond late last week I wrote:

The change in weather weighed heavy today. Every bone in my body ached.
My jaw clenched as my third eye pulsed.
Indelible and subtle, this signaling of the season to come.
Tell-tale morning chill.
Golden haze on aspen, ash and farmers’ fields.
Sun that sets earlier, rises later.

Geese gathered on the cat-tail bordered pond, leisurely swim in the same V formation as they fly.
And for a moment I hear in my head the opening lines to a favourite Mary Oliver poem, Wild Geese.
Try to speak aloud from memory. Give up but remember its essence,
remember the world announcing my place in the family of things.

Look up into that blue sky, heavy with lead bottomed clouds.
Beseech the wind who is my guardian,
“Where is it I’m meant to be?”

Like a squirrel gathering nuts, the geese and crows gathering to migrate south, I’m beginning to prepare myself for fall. Like its predecessors, spring and summer of 2020, I imagine it, too, will be the likes of which none of us has ever experienced. More pronounced again have been those waves of grief as I realize all too soon the ease with which we’ve been able to safely see friends will pass as colder temperatures and shorter days become the norm. And still, though curiously more acute, the sur-reality of living in this pandemic, every day continuing to learn more and more its impacts. Something I felt in the spring, but was able to hold lightly, off to the side during summer.

“… it is in those moments that we must remember the difference between despair and grief.
While despair traps us in the bog of despondency,
grief carries us into life.
Grief calls us into a deeper engagement with those things that we love. And even as we are losing them, grief wants to exalt their beauty.
If we let grief move us into expression, it will sing the blood into our songs, colour the vividness into our paintings,
and slip the poetry between our words.

Toko-pa Turner,
Facebook post, August 14, 2020

So thoroughly engaged in the first programs I took under their hosting this spring, in the pandemic’s novel, early days, I signed on to another self study with the Abbey of the Arts. Starting in September for twelve weeks, “Way of the Monk, Path of the Artist,” promises to be an equally deep, communal dive into creative expression. I’m lightly researching how and what I need to begin a project based on some mandala paintings I’ve made over the years, and today I signed on for a self-paced study in abstract creative painting. Lonely for community, I’ve decided to resume my weekly Saturday river valley walks with the local Camino group.

It’s a delicate balancing act, like the pattern I’ve noticed when I’ve been out and about a bit, around more people than usual. Without much conscious thought, I find myself laying low for the following several days, staying home, and only going out to walk Annie. I hear friends and family acknowledge their loneliness, while others live with the millstone of chronic illness and the deaths of their beloveds. My heart aches for my sister, recently moved to the States, where as the crow flies only fifteen minutes from her children, grandchildren and our parents, but with the border closed, now for another month, now an eternity away. I prudently expect more of our traditional celebrations – Thanksgiving, Hallowe’en, Christmas, New Year’s – will continue to be severely curtailed by Covid-19.

“Rumi says, ‘All medicine wants is pain to cure.’
And so we must cry out in our weakness, our ineptitude,
our beautiful inadequacy and make of it an invitation
that medicine might reach through and towards us.”

Toko-pa Turner,
Facebook post, August 14, 2020

Sitting by the pond, in response to my question, the wind whispers:

Right here, dear daughter.
Resting in the still warm sun. Breathing in the fresh northern air.
Your hair like the green rushes, swaying, dipping and dancing
in rhythm to my silent song.
Right here. Right now. This.

With love and kindest regards, dear friends.