This certainly wasn't what I originally had planned for my birthday. Originally, the plan was to be setting off on a Mediterranean Cruise with my mom that would have traveled from Marseille through Genoa, Naples, Messina, Valletta, Palma de Mallorca, and Barcelona, and then ending the week with my husband in Nice, France. Obviously, being on stay home orders in Michigan isn't quite the same.
What a strange way to celebrate a birthday- pandemic style. Step 1: Homemade face mask to stay protected before running out for a birthday take-out meal treat. A meal that also happens to be the same meal that follows the question of what would your last meal on earth be if you were on death row and had a choice? Well, if I get this virus, hopefully it’s not my last meal, but if it is, at least I’ll die happy?! Step 2: Make your quarantine space more desirable to stay in so it can feel more like paradise. Set up a hammock, and enjoy relaxing in whatever warm sunshine and cool air you can get in between spring storms. Step 3: Contemplate a last will and testament, not because you’re dramatic or have a lot of assets to sort out, but because you’re realistic, entering mid-life, and living in a time that is highly unpredictable. Why not have some kind of order laid out for what happens to your stuff when you’re gone? Step 4: Keep figuring out how to navigate any sense of self-care routine, family and friend connections, creative progress, and meaningful purpose among increasing degrees of total uncertainty. Step 5: Surrender as often as possible. Sometimes you just need to lay on the surfboard and relax rather than fight the waves.
This was, however, my first time leaving the house and the neighborhood to get a take-out treat for myself since clearing my public health monitored quarantine check-in period after arriving from Paris. What an oddly different world to return to and venture out in this year for my birthday.
The weather has been too cold most days to go out for a long walk, but we finally had a break that gave us an opportunity to spend a little more time outside without it being too cold, too rainy, or muddy.
Even for someone like me, who is very used to staying home and working from home, the quarantine period has still had its moments of challenges and difficulties. Learning how to navigate these peacefully in healthy ways has been part of the learning experience of this pandemic.
The idea of staying home will challenge us to find happiness in stillness, peace in ourselves, joy in what we already have. When we constantly chase the idea that happiness is something that exists outside our walls, outside our body, or outside our town, we create habits of chasing a happiness that is never ours to hold, never ours to cultivate, only fleeting and temporary and unsettled. I used to believe happiness was always somewhere else, somewhere other than where I was. It made me cultivate a life of constantly running away, constantly seeking something new or different. Over time I have learned how to cultivate happiness within. It has taken a lot of self development work, but I get to reap the rewards of a peaceful mind and a joyful heart every single day, even when things are really hard, because I have learned what helps me manage and transform right where I am rather than running away. The result is a happiness and peace that is now always accessible to me. Having this peace helps me be more aware of how it is healthiest for me to stay informed with news and information so that I don’t continue to choose options that overwhelm my senses with emotional triggers of fear and anger that disrupt immunity. Having this peace has created stronger personal boundaries on how I manage the aggressions of others and myself. While I don’t claim to be perfect, I’m far better than I used to be. If you have the ability to stay home right now, and you have the gift of extra time, you can spend more time learning and practicing how to cultivate this peace for yourself. Maybe you’ll choose deep breathing exercises or meditation. Maybe it will be yoga or exercise. Maybe it will be learning a self-care ritual or self-healing technique. Maybe it will be learning anger management techniques. If you have the intent to find peace and happiness within yourself, and you get curious to try new things, you will eventually find the right answers for you.
Taking note of the rising death counts, shortages of supplies for healthcare workers, and thoughts of people never getting to say goodbye to their loved ones on ventilators has definitely hit me hard in the heart. I see other people grieving as well- but sometimes with far less empathy or compassion- and much more anger and frustration. This also takes a toll on me, and forces me to find more tools and resources for coping and returning to balance within my empathetic sensitivities.
Having a wide open heart is not easy right now. Outstretched to be accessible to friends and family at distance, but also outstretched to worry more about all that we cannot control. It’s akin to grief. Loving and needing to let go all at the same time. Needing to be separate to be safe enough to see better days ahead, while wanting so desperately to be close. The conflicting desires and feelings keep clashing like waves of emotion in the body. We may grasp for anger to find ways to separate our heart from the hurt that it feels in this conflict. We may cry tears of surrender for all that can’t be what we wish it would be. There is no right answer and the only way is through the feelings, through the grief, through the thick muck of the emotional moments. This is the same tension and pain of the spring bud that keeps growing in order to the see the sunlight it is designed to reach for, even while it feels confined in darkness and protection from winter’s frost. Riding the emotional waves is not easy. It forces us to become better swimmers, kayakers, and captains of our emotional bodies. Asking for the space or considerations we need from people who usually look to us for strength and resilience. When we close our heart off to avoid the pain we might feel, we close it off to the beauty we might feel as well. To be fully alive, we must be comfortable sitting with all the waves of emotion even when all we see is darkness and can only wish that light will come soon. Sending my love and understanding to everyone riding the big emotional waves right now. I’m right here with you, feeling it all too.
I think other people are sometimes afraid of this open outpouring of emotion and compassion- unsure of whether it's safe or not to express it openly as an act of raw vulnerability. They question if it comes across as mentally healthy or rational. To them I say, I share these feelings with full consciousness that it is in our vulnerability that we normalize our waves of emotion as being perfectly acceptable and valid during this time. To suppress them may actually be less healthy than simply acknowledging them and sharing them.
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If you hold this image far enough away, it could just look like a mountain. If I told you what this mountain was made of in this moment, it would be care and concern for loved ones. The emotional weight of not knowing certain things, not having open lines of communication, not having regular touch points increases the mountain of care and concern, like the weight of snow piling up before a landslide. I am fortunate that to date, my immediate circle is healthy and safe, protected and strong, and even still, it all feels like a mountain of concern for the potential of what cannot be seen, what cannot be anticipated, and what cannot be protected. I do my best to melt my concern it in the sun, but each day a new snowfall of concern comes my way, rests on my head and my heart, and prepares a landslide of tears to be shed. This concern does not make me weak or afraid. Quite the opposite. I hold my ground, like a mountain, standing strong while the snowfall of concern continues to fall, weighing on my head, weighing on my heart, until it melts to tears and releases again.
As a lifelong artist, I have recognized that our emotions are the seeds of amazing art. To feel them and live them fully through creative expression is to be fully alive and powerfully in touch with ourselves and our human experience.
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People who have never made their living as an artist have no idea how much courage, strength, and fortitude it takes. They assume artists are only sensitive and weak, but fail to recognize how many times an artist must overcome inner and outer obstacles as well as objections just to share a piece of their art with the world. People who have never dared to make something personal, honest, and revealing would never understand the level of grit and courage it takes to be so open and vulnerable to public judgement. Their insecurities would never allow them to bare their soul in such a way because it would reveal all the weaknesses they constantly seek to hide and cover up by attaining the approval of others in whatever way they can. Think twice before you see the soft heart of an artist laid out in creation. What they share holds massive power because it means they have accepted their sensitivities and turned them into superpowers that can captivate, excite, arouse, and make you wish you were courageous enough to be an artist too. People who would never dare to publicly share so much of their depth may call artists crazy, wild, unstable, or irrational- but it has nothing to do with the artist. This level of ownership over one’s talents, weaknesses, flaws, emotions, and expressions is simply too inconceivable for someone who can’t accept their self without approval from everyone else first. To all of my artistic and creative friends... please stay crazy, wild, authentic, honest, emotional, and expressive. You help the world see truth in new ways. You help us find emotions we didn’t know we had. You help us see possibilities we never could have imagined. Stay courageous and crazy- it’s the only sane way of living authentically.
Multiple times during the week I was reminded of the power of creativity, and how the earth provides so much material for us to work with and create with, and we should never take that for granted.
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