Spacious Solidarity Blog - Day 108

The UK has officially been on lockdown since March 23rd, but my partner and I started self-isolating a week earlier on March 16th. Today is July 1st.

Slowly the lockdown has started to ease. We’re allowed to gather in groups of six outdoors. Garden parties are allowed. After July 4th we are most likely going to be able to travel to other parts of the country and some parts of Europe.

High street shops have slowly begun to open. Soon the pubs and hairdressers will follow. Meanwhile, one city in the UK, Leicester, has gone into full lockdown. No one in, no one out. I don’t know what data is used to decide to do that and wonder if London could follow suit.

There is no guarantee there won’t be another peak, we still don’t have a vaccine, and the virus continues to mutate. We are only beginning to learn about the long-term effects of being sick with COVID 19.

I still don’t know when I’ll see my family again.

It’s a lot worse in the USA. People are starting to revolt against having to wear masks and states that eased their lockdowns too early are seeing their infection numbers skyrocket.

Meanwhile, news that Russia paid bounties to the Taliban to kill US troops means nothing anymore in a post-truth, post-impeachment world. And the Arctic just hit 101 degrees Fahrenheit last week.

I’ve been writing every day since going into self-isolation. It’s felt important to write down as much as I can about this time and how it’s unfolded and continues to unfold. I’m grateful to my partner, who suggested it when we decided to self-isolate.

“We need to keep a diary.” they had said.

This week a magnolia flower appeared outside my window. I remember magnolias blooming back in mid-March when the lockdown started. I’ve never seen a magnolia flower bloom in late June.

In addition to representing beauty and dignity, the magnolia flower also symbolizes longevity and perseverance. Seems apt.

Time has been a shapeshifter over the course of the lockdown. Sometimes moving slowly, sometimes fast, sometimes seeming to stop altogether and sometimes feeling like it’s slipping backwards.

Something about my imagined future being pulled out from underneath me and the same happening to everyone on the planet feels both historic and prophetic. It simultaneously connects us all with each other and with people from times past who withstood similar challenges in the face of pandemic.

And it also connects us with those to come, our descendants. I can hear their voices which grow stronger every day. They are calling to us to wake up to the immediacy of the moment, that there is no time to waste and that their lives depend on us.

When I had to wipe my calendar clean all that was left was today. At the beginning of the lockdown, today became a novelty, something infinitely fascinating in its newness, only because it was no longer planned, no longer dissected into numerous activities and meetings.

This newness meant I could pay more attention. More than I had before. My life became fascinating in its ordinariness. My neighborhood a playground to explore with wonder, nature rising up and showing herself to me in all her glory.

Have the birds always sung that loud? Has spring always manifested in so much variety, day after day, new waves of blooms of every shade of every colour, coming and going, rising and falling?

Has the sky always been that blue? And what about the clouds making their way across space, moving with such purpose towards their inevitable dissolution?

During one of the online retreats I’ve led during lockdown I set an intention to “take my time not wasting time.” I don’t really know what that means, but there is something about resting in an intention to not waste any time while also trusting that everything happens in its own time, takes its time, and that I also need to take my time.

Writing has been the mainstay of my life in a way I haven’t experienced since my early 20s. And surprisingly it has become a means of connection. Sharing myself and in turn receiving the effect of that sharing. Through emails and messages and phone calls I learned that for many it’s mattered what I have to say and how I have to say it and what it stirs in others.

Often times I haven’t known what to write and have had to simply trust that if I sit down and start typing something will come, and usually it comes from the depths and feels beyond or outside of me, and yet so very deeply personal.

The world keeps turning and I keep responding and so much of this time has been about learning how to trust the wholeness of that dynamic, how it rounds me out.

At some point even on lockdown “today” started to lose its allure. I became accustomed to this new life on Zoom with my daily walks to now completely familiar places. And then George Floyd was murdered and the world lurched forward and then was flung back again.

Lately I feel like I’m having the same conversations I was having twenty years ago while living in San Francisco. Recently I was going back through old photos I took while protesting against police brutality back in 2009, after Oscar Grant was killed by police in Oakland. Even then, there were people already making important and clear connections between Palestine and BLM.

If the pandemic is here to teach us anything it is that everything is connected. Deeply, intimately connected in ways our thinking brains cannot imagine. We must feel into this connection from the centre of our hearts.

We must trust that by allowing our hearts to break open, the depth of feeling available to us in that moment will guide us. In order to welcome heartbreak we’re going to have to let go of control, of all ideas that we know what’s happening or what should happen next.

We’re going to have to drop our defenses. Tear down the walls that keep us locked in the delusion of separateness. Instead, allowing discomfort and fear to reside alongside hope for a return to wholeness.

Many wise souls speaking out in this moment, like Angela Davis and Cornell West, are saying that the road ahead is a hard one. Things are going to get a lot worse. And it’s going to be painful. And we may not reap the benefits of the courage of our convictions in our own lifetimes.

But future generations will thank us. That much I know is true.

 P.s. What I don’t want to forget the feeling of:

London slowing down and going quiet, everything coming into deep relationship with stillness

Watching my neighbours slowly get interested in each other

The girls upstairs hanging out on the front doorstep

Clapping for the NHS on a Thursday at 8pm

Getting used to the sound of my neighbour’s little girl, no more than two, calling out for her dad from their front doorstep

Getting used to the sound of the musicians across the street playing banjo, guitar, and saxophone

Getting used to the sound of my neighbors two doors down playing music in their front garden

Laying in the grass watching the clouds go by

Laying on my lounge floor watching the clouds go by

Making new friends over Zoom

Family cocktail hour on Zoom

Meditating with Shraddhasiddhi (my partner)

Spend the most amount of uninterrupted time with Shraddhasiddhi since the day we met eight years ago

Trusting emergence

Listening to the rain

Leading meditations on Zoom and feeling deeply connected through the magic of video conferencing

Recommitting to being an anti-racist every single morning

The koan of Black Lives Matter