My Snow Globe Has Chemtrails
I have found a newer sense of love. My role as a father is shrinking, shifting, and at the same time I know it will never go away or the concern lessen. And even on the other spectrum of love I find romance also feels more fluid. I find myself having to spend less and less time with the loves that seem to linger. It is more like cherishing what remains of those experiences,despite knowing I can't touch them today. Hopefully, I'm cherishing these apparent memories, tattooed, and hopefully not scarred. I am appreciative of this reminiscence because it reinforces that when you fully understand loves nature, love tells us that it isn't lost or gone. Lost lovers are actually gone, friends can leave, people can die, but the love they shared with me is still embedded in my psychology. Relationships die, perplexingly leaving me without a cadaver to mourn. We as a culture tend to focus on what is lost mistaking those things for love itself. What a disservice to think love can die. Love is! Love is not the plane dusting a blank blue sky. Love is the chemical reaction waiting, preparing, combusting, cooling, dissipating, and redistributing all the molecules in way that they can love again. My little snow globe has chemtrails and they very well can be vapor too.
Self Isolating in solitude
Hello World!
As a programmer this used be the beginning of a new lesson in a language I was introduced to. It may be equally valid today. I am learning a language called social distancing. We are in a pandemic. There is a virus that is highly transmittable, fatal for the vulnerable, and incurable at the time I'm writing this. And because of the uncertainty of how this can incapacitate a medical system, the world, my city, and my community are practicing social distancing.
I love it. I have noticed how the simplicity that isolation, self quarantine, or what I might reframe as gifted solitude, liberates me from the obligations that modern living teases me with. My introvert is nurtured. I am respectful of the anxiety of being alone can create. I am around plenty of loved ones to feel fulfilled. I get plenty of fresh air to feel replenished. I have plenty of funds and resources to feel sustained. I rarely leaned into luxuries and not even my coffee skills help me feel like I haven't even lost my gourmet caffeine addiction. I feel blessed amid this tragedy.
I walked into my daughter's rooms and straddled the thresholds to their entrances and asked them to recall the book we read together at bedtime about Anne Frank. I invited them to put into perspective the juxtaposition with what we are living and what she might have had to. I asked them to consider how much more extreme her conditions where. I asked them because I recognize how far worse the plague of human ignorance can be. I respect the cosmic existence of this virus. I take time to visit the through segments reported on the realities of this virus' bite.
I try and sympathize with the sadness that COVID-19 brings to families. I work really hard to transcend the politics around health care, the economy, and partisanship. I am glad I feel encouraged to write in these times. I want the World to know that quarantine can be a gift of solitude, and paradoxically I respect how antagonizing being forced to turn off your human connections can be. I am grateful to my ex-wife for loving so deep at one point in my life, it forced me to suffer the loneliness that I feel gives me to fortitude to appreciate the isolation I am asked to practice now. I am reminded of my grandmother, reminiscing on how she would tell me that she was happiest in her home.
My grandma, I am beginning to understand how home is joy, and isolation is not so much a restriction but a gift of solitude.