#SOL20 - Try to Stay Curious: Notes from the Pandemic

Forgetfulness (M.A. Reilly)

I. 

Towards the end of Rob's life a friend sent me a private tweet that simply said, Try to stay curious. It was important advice. At times of such adversity and sorrow, staying curious also kept me noticing and being in the present moment.

I have been remembering that tweet, the advice, and how it remains a constant in my life as I navigate these new ways of being in the world. I want to wish you the gift of staying curious too as you deal with the day-to-day uncertainty that we rarely feel so acutely as we do now.

Try to remain curious.

II.

Remaining curious is a slippery venture. I say that I want to remain curious and I look outward to do so. For example, last week, a principal in Newark sent a text with a link to nearly 500 online courses . Such possibilities.  I want to return to painting.  I noticed quite a few emails from artists I have taken courses with before who are offering free courses during this mostly, if not always, at home time.

Sometime curiosity is lodged externally.

Today, I read another email from a different principal who explained,

We have introduced themes. This week we had "Wacky Hat Wednesday '' where teachers taught with their wacky hats and were either live for students to see or took pictures. Friday was my favorite “Disney Character Day.”

I wondered about those images and the laughter they surely generated, and how in doing so community and strength and kindness were also shared. 

Sometimes curiosity leads to bigger ideas and understandings.

III.

Reservoir (M.A. Reilly)

To stay curious I sometimes turn to the outside:

• I walk outside. I live somewhere new after nearly 18 years and the outside world has changed. It is built up where I live now. Planned. I have left places like the reservoir above. Finding my way now is different. Difference opens me to being curious.
• I listen to others. I learn something new daily from my daughter. She is a fount of knowledge. There are generational differences. Yesterday she was in my car as I was on a phone call.  Many of us on the call have difficulty muting and unmuting. She  shook her head at our fumbling and told me she would share some more modern ways of communicating. It made me laugh. 

• I phone my nearly 90-year-old mother-in-law weekly to catch up. Her world is one of repetition and there is solace in that I notice.
• I talk to my brothers, friends, and colleagues. This is always an emerging conversation. Up until restaurants, etc. were all closed, I had a weekly dinner with three friends on Thursdays. We chat now by phone although I think this week we will do so by Zoom. What is happening in their lives leaves me curious as well.
• I photograph. I have photographed for so long that my hand knows the shape of the camera and my body knows when the image I made will be one I will savor.
• I participate in twitter chats. I learn with Twitter from those I follow. This past week found me exchanging private tweets with people from the US and Ireland. Such depth there.  And the irony was when I finally remembered to get my mail there was a card from Ireland with this closing message: 

"Thus accept this card, sent to all of us, to celebrate everything wonderful about having the support and love of good people in a good world during good times and not-so-good-times."  

My coffee table, currently.

To stay curious, I turn inward:

• I read, listen, view poetry. No other type of text fills me with as much wonder as poetry does.
• I keep notebooks: handwritten and electronic journals, art journals, blank notebooks just waiting.  It may be the blank ones that keep me curious. Although rereading notebooks often leads to more writing, art making.
• I keep piles of books nearby and read between and among the texts. It's like a new kind of authoring.
• I follow links that lead to links and more links. I learn this way.
• I stay open to possibility.
• I cook. Okay this may not be as robust as everything else. But I have hope that I will return to this soon.
• I make/unmake collage.
• I alter images.
• I play.

What are you doing to stay curious?

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#PoetryBreak: Spring (Again)

Ophelia (M.A. Reilly)

Spring (Again) 

Michael Ryan

The birds were louder this morning,
raucous, oblivious, tweeting their teensy bird-brains out.
It scared me, until I remembered it’s Spring.
How do they know it? A stupid question.
Thank you, birdies. I had forgotten how promise feels. 

#PoetryBreak - Spring Morning

Spring (M.A. Reilly)

Spring Morning 

Marion Strobel

O day—if I could cup my hands and drink of you, 
And make this shining wonder be 
A part of me! 
O day! O day!
You lift and sway your colors on the sky 
Till I am crushed with beauty. Why is there 
More of reeling sunlit air 
Than I can breathe? Why is there sound 
In silence? Why is a singing wound 
About each hour? 
And perfume when there is no flower?
O day! O Day! How may I press 
Nearer to loveliness?

#SOL20 - Routines: Notes from the Pandemic

ˆ (M.A. Reilly, Leonia, NJ)

I.

So I have a routine now for taking in groceries that involves Clorox wipes. 
I have a routine for washing hands. 
I have a routine for cleaning all kinds of handles, many I feel certain I have not previously cleaned.  
I have yet to succumb to indiscriminately spraying Lysol, but I do have a can on hand.

In times of uncertainty, routines offer a temporary balm.


II.

I no longer can count the number of friends, colleagues, and family who have said, texted, tweeted, or emailed that something good will come of this pandemic. And yes, I too have joined that chorus and said similarly.

Tonight I am wondering why. To whom were we saying that? Why were we saying that?


III.

Seeking good out of tragedy is no modern meme. Giovanni Boccaccio's The Decameron, completed in 1353, showed us that.  The Decameron is the fictive telling of 100 stories by seven women and three men who stay in a deserted villa outside of Florence intent on escaping the Black Death.  Across each of the ten nights each told a story.  

For the second night. Filomena imposed a particular type of story that the ladies and men would each tell. She said to the small group,

"...from the beginning of time, people have been subject to the whims of Fate, and so they shall be until the world ends; and your stories are all to show how a person who had been thwarted by ill fortune comes to have a happy ending that defies his expectations" (p.62).

IV. 

In the 3.17.20 issue of The Washington Post,  Emily Balcetis writes:

"...in times of heightened stress, people tend to resort to “magical thinking” and superstitious behavior — particularly when there seem to be few ways to exert control over a situation."

Everything will be fine.
Everything will be good.


We do not need to wait for the pandemic to be over for goodness to emerge. 
We do not need to hold our breaths. 
We do not need to think we are subject to fate.

We make the good as we live.
How we live now, now and now, is self defining.




Cited:

Boccaccio, Giovanni. (1993). The Decameron. Translated by Guido Waldman New York: Oxford University Press.

#PoetryBreak: Still I Rise

Still I Rise

BY MAYA ANGELOU

Maya (M.A. Reilly, 2019)

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise" from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems.  Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou.  Used by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

#SOL20 - Stories: Notes from the Pandemic

Community is Infinite (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

A colleague, Carolyn, phones and relays a story of a friend’s elderly mother dying alone in a nursing home this past week. She says that the whole family was unable to be with their mother due to COVID-19 rules. It’s not that the death was unexpected, but it is that the closure the daughter expected would not be forthcoming.

I listen as she tells me: She's Catholic. She expected to wake her mother, to have a mass, a burial. Nothing outside the norm.

But the norm now has changed.


II.

Hearing the story had me imagining the daughter.  Maybe she wanted the burning of Frankincense and Myrrh, or she needed the words that would have been spoken by the priest who surely knew the 91-year old. Or perhaps she was seeking an odd comfort in knowing that at the back of the church, seated on those last few pews would have been the professional mourners, those older, devoted women who attended every Catholic funeral and lent their voices to the ritual.

She might have been thinking how she would sit quietly in a car near the front of the procession of cars, all with their headlights lit, and travel slowly to the cemetery. She might have imagined how  her body leaning against a sister, a husband, a grown child would have comforted her as they stood graveside. Perhaps comfort came imagining a celebratory meal where immediate and more distant family talked about the woman they had known.

But none of this was not to happen for she was told that the wake could be no more than 60 minutes, that there was a limit to the number of people who were allowed to gather, and the burial would not be preceded by a public mass.

Quick, quiet, small and efficient.


III.

So what does she have? asks Carolyn. What's left?

We share silence as there isn't a lot to offer at the moment. Each of us has buried our own mother and surely we are in our heads at that moment. And out of that space of silence, I remember the circle of people.


IV.

When Rob was being weaned off high-flow oxygen in a palliative care center at a hospital, the worse thing was walking the hall each morning and passing rooms that had been occupied and now were empty. They were always so sanitized, so washed down and empty.

Bare mattresses.
Swept and mopped floors.


One afternoon though as I sat next to Rob watching him sleep, I heard the unmistakable sound of laughter. The palliative care center was usually a quiet place and this was not polite laughter. Rather, the sounds coming from down the hall were a roll-in-the-aisle, split-your-side kind of laughter. Full. Robust. I followed it and saw that there in the once empty room were now a group of chairs. The bed and dresser had been removed. Coats and brightly colored scarves were draped on the back of chairs and a group of people were seated in a circle. They were telling stories about their mother, aunt, sister, friend and those stories had them laughing.


V.

Leslie Marmon Silko in the opening of her novel, Ceremony writes:

I will tell you something about stories,

[he said]

They aren't just entertainment.

Don't be fooled.

They are all we have, you see,

all we have to fight off

illness and death.

You don't have anything

if you don't have stories.

Stories.

In this time of COVID-19, we do not have the physical circle, but we do have stories and ways of sharing them.

Stories to tell. Stories to recount. Stories to write down or sound out as we live through this. Stories to tell one another.

Stories to tell about those who lived and those who did not.
Stories to comfort, honor, and memorialize.

Stories to help us remember and to allow us to forget.

Stories.

What stories will you tell?

#PoetryBreak: Break

Today's poetry break and I hope it inspires you to teak a break from all that is churning around us.

from Wales (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

Break

We put the puzzle together piece
by piece, loving how one curved
notch fits so sweetly with another.
A yellow smudge becomes
the brush of a broom, and two blue arms
fill in the last of the sky.
We patch together porch swings and autumn
trees, matching gold to gold. We hold
the eyes of deer in our palms, a pair
of brown shoes. We do this as the child
circles her room, impatient
with her blossoming, tired
of the neat house, the made bed,
the good food. We let her brood
as we shuffle through the pieces,
setting each one into place with a satisfied
tap, our backs turned for a few hours
to a world that is crumbling, a sky
that is falling, the pieces
we are required to return to.

—Dorianne Laux