Spacious Solidarity Blog: Day 67

If it wasn’t for conornavirus, I would have been up this morning at 5:30am and out the door by six to catch a flight from Gatwick to JFK.

Instead, I sleep in again.

The plan was to stay with a friend in Harlem and then travel with her to the Omega Retreat Centre in upstate New York to attend a conference on the intersection of dharma and racial justice.

Then I had two weeks to chill in and around NYC, visiting friends and doing a bit of teaching, before heading back to Omega to lead a mindfulness retreat with another friend.

Next on the itinerary, a month-long and much needed silent retreat with friends in California. I was to end my trip back in Boston, meeting my partner at the airport and driving up to Maine together for a two-week holiday and to see my family.

Now I don’t even know whether I’ll be able to get my internal flight between NYC and SF refunded, as it is yet to be canceled.

I don’t feel too much grief about missing out on all that. Maybe it’s because it’s not just me who’s missing out. All of everything I just mentioned has been canceled for all of everyone involved. And NYC is the last place I’d want to travel to just now.

Of course, I’m sad not to be seeing my friends and family. And I wouldn’t mind going to Maine.

We’ve been having a heatwave in London and today is the hottest day so far. What I wouldn’t give to be 100 ft from a lake I could jump in at a moment’s notice. The water smooth and silky against my skin, just the right temperature.

I’d swim all the way across it in under 15 minutes (it’s not a big lake) and then sunbathe for a bit on the rocks on the other side, watching soft, puffy clouds drifting past in a deep blue sky.

A dragonfly might come by or I might spot a turtle sunning itself on an exposed log. After a little while I’d head back to our shore.

Afterwards I would grill my lunch, vegetables and vegetarian kielbasa, served with crisps and a cold beer. I would eat out on the deck overlooking the lake under the shade of oak, pine, beech and birch trees.

At night we’d play card games and Scrabble before heading to bed to fall asleep to the sound of the loons calling to one another across the lake. Bliss.

This morning, instead of traveling, I’m doing my usual emailing and writing. At 12:30pm I speak with a friend who reached out to get some support around her meditation practice. We talk around how to work creatively with feelings related to the state of the world like anger, sadness, and despondency.

I’m so appreciative of the curiosity and courage it takes to not only ask such questions but also to reach out and get support exploring them. I tell her it’s a lifelong journey, how to live in this imperfect world and keep doing all we can to make it just a little bit more beautiful.

The tension between the ideal and what’s actually happening gets a good look in during our conversation. We touch upon the themes of moving from either/or to both/and thinking and relating to the complexity of ourselves, our experience and the world.

Afterwards I have some lunch, same as yesterday except with avocado as well. Then it’s back to the bedroom while my partner’s on Zoom in the front room.

My sister has posted a photo of my mother’s old recipe book on Facebook. It’s all hand-written, in Spanish and cursive, using the metric system. My 17-year-old niece has taken on the painstaking project of trying to translate it.

I really hope I’ll be able to make something from that book. My fear is it will be very meat-based.

I comment on the post and my sister asks me if I remember my mother’s “farina cake”. Immediately I get a sense in my mouth of something dry and tasteless. My sister comments back saying she used to love it.

Basically, it’s a cake made from a product called “farina” which, if I remember correctly, was a kind of milled wheat usually used as a hot cereal. I look it up and it’s Wikipedia page also says that it’s high in iron, ideal for a vegetarian diet!

I’ll have to get over my bad memories and try it again, maybe with my remaining manjar.

In the afternoon I’m back on Zoom with my father to continue with his interview. He tells me all about the rest of what he can remember about his mother’s side of the family and then we start talking about his father, who trained as a nephrologist and taught medical students and did research at the University of Santiago.

He loved his work. My father was the only child, out of eight, to follow in his footsteps and train as a surgeon. But my dad didn’t get his inspiration from his father alone. He also got it from his uncle and godfather Oscar, who worked as a physician and used to take my father along with him on house calls.

My dad says that the house calls were about five minutes of tending to the patient and twenty minutes of having a drink and a chat. His uncle was very sociable and my dad followed suit. I think that’s why he finds lockdown so difficult.

In the late afternoon we go for a walk and a rest in Hackney Downs. On the way we see four young people in the painted car I photographed last night. First we see them drive past us and then later park up in the same spot as yesterday.

The driver is a woman with long blonde hair, neon coloured dreadlocks, and tattoos. She has been food shopping with her friends. We soon realise they all live as guardians in the closed down primary school across the street from the park.

We’ve noticed them a few times before. They often hang out in the playground tending their plants, exercising and, just the other evening, busking. Or at least trying to. There was a woman who sounded brilliant over her mic and portable speaker, but we only heard her for a moment before the speaker went.

The park’s as crowded as I’ve ever seen it and it’s hard to find a quiet spot to lay down. My partner says they don’t like our spot anymore because too many people pee in the nearby hedgerow.

So instead we head for the furthest southwest corner of the park but there is nowhere good that’s both in the shade but not too close to the path. We head back to our spot and settle for a patch of shade behind the primrose bushes but far enough from the hedgerow to avoid the stench of urine.

We hang out for a little over an hour and then head home to eat leftovers for dinner.

While eating we hear the clap for the NHS which tonight also includes what sounds like a full ensemble of homemade instruments from our neighbours across the street. For the rest of the night, it sounds like there is a street party happening just out of sight. We can hear music, lots of talking and occasional clapping and cheering.

My partner needs to do some homework for their counseling course so I decide to watch a bit of TV, Season 6 of Schitt’s Creek. It’s a Canadian comedy about a super-rich family who end up losing all their money due to the corruption of their accountant, unbeknownst to them.

They end up moving to a small, rural town that the father bought for the son as a joke years ago, Schitt’s Creek. They move into the local motel and the rest of the show is all about the trials and tribulations of trying to fit into a small, working class community.

It’s actually pretty funny and provides some good, light-hearted humour, especially when life feels particularly shitty. One of the leads is also queer, which I always find refreshing.

There is something in what that show is about which is what I feel like is happening to people during lockdown. The family soon learns that all they really have is each other, and their relationships start to deepen.

They also begin to forge important relationships with the people around them, their new neighbours, friends, co-workers and lovers. The moral of the story: money doesn’t only not solve everything or make you happy, it also can end up driving a wedge between you and your loved ones, leaving you shallow and full of yourself, and definitely not happy.

Better to live a simple life and focus on what’s most important; love.