Perhaps because I was out and about this week, this morning I’m aware of what it was to have the world so suddenly close up on March 17, 2020.  Steve and I were enjoying a weekend in Monterey, when, like that, everything closed.  We drove home along the coast and stopped in Davenport, CA, where we were served the last cup of coffee before they closed up and were told that even that was “illegal”, but it’s a small place and they took pity on us. We bonded in saying goodbye to what we’d known before as we entered a new realm.

Suddenly we couldn’t see family or friends.  We spoke of forming “pods” of touch and communication.

How are we changed by this sudden awareness of oneness and passage of breath that meant isolation and with that, hopefully introspection and reflection on what matters?

I sit with that today as I try to absorb the “news” which is my own little pocket of information hand-picked and tailored for me.   Well, not chosen by hand, as much as computer generated.   

A friend recommended the book Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship.  It is by Terrence Real.  I’m still reading it but it’s about a relationship with ourselves and others, about the science affirming how we’re connected and influence each other.  Yes, we need to deal with unconscious responses formed in childhood, but when we learn to pause, to rest between stimulus and response, we come to a conscious, more adult choice now.

That brings me to these words of Jim Harrison: 

Moving water is forever in the present tense, a condition we rather achingly avoid.  

Aware, may we each move with the gift of presence, the wholeness we can hold like a nest, a flower clasped at the stem.