Lately, everything joyful makes me cry.
It's not the sad things- they come too often, like a new normal. It's the kind gestures, the ridiculousness in our chaotic home lives, the wild generosity. I think we're leaning into love as the tragedy reminds us just how human we are. And nothing makes us more human than our need for one another.
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I sit on the back porch staring at a tall head of overgrown St. Augustine grass. It's especially green for early April, a sign that mother nature has been plenty gracious with rain coverage in South Texas this year. The birds are happy too, frolicking from one tree to another, with an occasional scurry between two up in the tree, potentially mating or fighting a contender for the mate. Squirrels make their appearance as well, ravishing branches for meaty acorns, which on numerous occasions get swiped from a bird overhead. The ruckus usually spreads out across the yard beckoning my four-legged mutt to break up the disturbance.
It seems a bit unusual, in the grim time we find ourselves, to be experiencing a vibrant array of color, activity and vivaciousness. It's a reminder to me that life is never one way. It is not a time of doom, it is not a time of hope. It's a time to be present, and experience the paradoxical mystery of life. When the virus turned toward America and the global epidemic felt closer to home, I think at first, I was bummed that my plans were put on hold and my future was unpredictable. But as the beast has showed its grim, consumptions spread, and death has become something on the tips of all of our minds- I am trying to stare this thing in the face and understand this unique time we're in.
Someone said to me, "I didn't know pandemics were really a thing," which seemed ignorant at first, and then I thought of all the famines, plagues, flu outbreaks I've read about in books, they always seemed like a thing of the past- as if that were a different time period, but somehow we crossed a threshold in the past century eliminating human kind from seeing populations being swiped off the earth. So, yes it is strange to think that pandemics are actually a thing, and that our daily reality, that sometimes feels like a bad dream, is actually a sobering awareness that the earth is not done ruthlessly shedding civilizations from it's surface.
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AuthorKatie Elizabeth: Writer, Wonderer, Wanderer. ArchivesCategories |