Pandemic

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath –
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love –
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

~Lynn Ungar 3/11/20

We are living through a strange and difficult time. So many of our assumptions and practices no longer serve us or our larger communities. We are groping in the dark, making it up as we stumble forward, with little confidence that our leaders can or will safeguard our nation’s health.  As the leader of my faith community, I am mobilizing hard decisions on closures and cleaning where I have no experience, certainly no expertise, to bring to bear on tough issues.

As a nearly-61-year-old on immunosuppressants, I have reluctantly begun curtailing my activity outside my home. For the first time as a parent, there is nothing I can offer to my children should they become sick; I cannot, should not, go to them if they do, and as healthy young adults, the virus should not be a major event for them. For the first time as a mother, I need them to think of my well-being before their own, and to remember that their well-being, for a while longer, is still dependent on my own. These are mind-bending reorientations in thinking, in conceptualizing and fulfilling our roles as individuals—truly a paradigm shift. My older works in a global health institute that has found a renewed sense of mission as a repository and disseminator of expertise and information, even as she lives in a metropolitan area with considerable known infection rates. My younger attends a small college that is also struggling to make wise and practicable decisions about adapting schedules and calling closures. Her first spring break travel plans ever with friends are disintegrating, with the next question being, should she come home to her mother?

This morning, amid all these vexing and not completely answerable questions, I am comforted beyond measure by the fresh new poem above, composed for this very moment. Thinking of my sheltering in my home as a Sabbath reorients my thinking in a deeply positive way, encouraging me to walk my dog more in the depopulated nearby schoolyard, to read the stack of books that too often gets returned to the library unread due to the crush of meetings and commitments and media distraction, to not run out for a coffee or a few groceries to break the solitude of a day. I aim to embrace solitude and turn it to solace, to write more, to be in contact over distance with friends I mean to connect with but somehow never get to, to reach out with my heart, if not my frequently-washed hands, and creatively, virtually, embrace in spirit our broken world.

Mary Peckham for The Poplar Grove Muse