Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 38

Spoiler alert: details about the third season of Killing Eve towards the end of this post.

I have the best night’s sleep in weeks. I think it’s mostly because the night before I slept terribly and I’m also most likely getting my period any day now.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. I first learned of Earth Day on its 20th anniversary in 1990 when I was a teen-ager. There was an ad in the paper for an event celebrating the day. It was to be held out in a big field somewhere and there was going to be live music and speakers.

What I wouldn’t do to hang out with thousands of other earth-lovers dancing to the Indigo Girls and listening to Greta Thunburg give the speech of her life.

Over coffee I’m scrolling through Facebook, which has lost all of its allure. It’s turned out just how the Italian’s warned us.

We’ve run out of pandemic lockdown memes. Now my feed is full of ads for how to stay healthy and sane as the lockdown stretches on indefinitely.

Sometimes there is a photo of someone’s cat, sometimes a blossom. Sometimes a particularly well-cooked meal. Sometimes a kid at play in their allotment. Sometimes a newborn baby.

No fancy holidays, no group shots (unless resurrected from a “memory”), no reports from various meetings, gatherings, or conferences, no announcements of new jobs, or new homes, or new projects. Except for building projects. Somehow, they continue.

Sometimes friends post videos of themselves dancing in their living room, or leading meditation or yoga, or giving a little update from the front seat of their car.

There’s the occasional testimonial from a health care worker reminding us this thing is real and to hang in there. There are also lots of fundraisers, people doing laps in their back gardens. A 100-year-old man has managed to raise over £10 million for the NHS.

But I can sense a general fatigue in the air. There’s only so much photo snapping, video making, uploading and posting we can do before the need for a real, live human connection becomes so great we feel we might die without it.

What we all wouldn’t do for a day out in a grassy field dancing together under a bright blue sky.

Every once in a while, there’s the story of someone’s death from COVID-19 and the effect it’s had on those who love them. A somber reminder that people are still dying.

My sister and others like her are doing everything they can to keep them alive. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. In the UK the death toll still rises, surpassing 18,000 now, even as the politicians say we’re flattening the curve.

It’s confusing because the pattern of deaths/day creates peaks and troughs, peaks and troughs out of the scientist’s fancy graphs. And there’s always a reporting lag after the weekend. I can’t tell what the difference is between a peak and a spike, and it seems the politicians can’t either.

Meanwhile oil prices have dropped so low that they are now below zero. Apparently oil companies have run out of places to store all the oil they’ve taken out of the ground since the beginning of this whole, sloppy mess. They are so desperate to get rid of it that they are actually paying buyers to take it off their hands.

Capitalism has literally turned itself upside down and inside out. I think to myself any sane person would simply stop taking it out of the ground. Find a new way to produce energy.

In May I was meant to be teaching on two week-long retreats. One in the highlands of Scotland for people interested in learning how to meditate while also doing some hill walking. The other for experienced practitioners looking to take things deeper in the wilds of northwest Wales.

I spend the morning on Zoom calls and emails trying to work out if it’s possible to offer either of these retreats online. It’s slow progress, but it looks like it’s not only possible but could also actually happen. I feel please at my tenacity and also a bit concerned I may be taking on too much now.

Then I’m helping a friend with how to use Zoom. She’s a mindfulness teacher who wants to get her regular drop-in meditation class back up and running again. She’s a quick study and it’s a delight to see her get so much out of the little I can share with her. I’m still learning myself.

At mid-day we head out for our daily walk around Hackney Downs and then it’s a quick dash to the local shop for some essentials. Thankfully its really quiet in the shop.

I ask the man behind the till how he’s doing. He says things are alright. I thank him for keeping the shop open and for stocking such beautiful produce. He smiles.

I ask if they are struggling to keep things in store. He says it’s a lot more work than usual but they are managing. I can tell he is trying hard not to raise any alarms. My heart swells with gratitude.

After lunch I do a bit of writing and then it’s time to get on Zoom again for a mtg. Someone on the call, sat in her back garden, comments on the good weather we are having. She says that under normal circumstances that is all Brits would be talking about but because of coronavirus, no one dare mention it. She actually misses talking about the weather.

I marvel at the phenomenon. Something so catastrophic has happened that British people have stopped talking about the weather. The world really is coming to an end.

We have some dinner and then it’s time to lounge, me on the sofa and my partner on our comfy chair, each on our respective laptops. My partner is listening to another of New York State governor Andrew Cuomo’s press conferences.

He’s saying this isn’t the time to act stupidly. I wonder to myself if there ever is a time to act stupidly. It’s obvious who he is calling out. He continues:

“We’re not going to let people die because we acted imprudently.”

I’m only hearing his voice, which sounds shaky. My partner tells me that as he’s speaking, tears are welling up in his eyes.

Meanwhile, the UK government is saying that things aren’t going to be returning to normal anytime soon. We’ll be social distancing until we get a vaccine and that won’t happen for at least a year.

Coronavirus is here to stay, so get used to it.

I call a friend of mine who had specifically requested we speak by phone rather than video conference. She answers my call and immediately admits that she’d like to see me, can we Zoom? Of course we can Zoom.

We Zoom for a little over an hour and I am reassured that she is doing fine. I should have known, she’s an introvert living alone, infinitely creative, deeply reflective. The biggest thing she misses is swimming. We have this in common, among other things.

Before bed we watch another episode of Killing Eve. My partner predictably falls asleep as I grow bored and frustrated. It’s a typical third season, re-hashing the same old ground.

There’s one scene where Villanelle is dressed as a clown. They’ve done a really good job making her up so that she is completely unrecognizable. Again, I can’t take my eyes off her. She’s so callous and selfish, crass and unhinged.

She is the perfect shadow to Eve’s higher ground and where they meet in the middle is a beautifully scary, murky mess. At the very end of the episode Villanelle finds out that Eve is still alive, foreshadowing an inevitable reunion.

I decide I’ll keep watching for now.