Wrote this a year ago on Facebook, and I thought I’d share it here as well.
The last couple of posts of mine have been… a little sombre, sober, sad. It is important to understand, though… they were written in a particular state of mind. And no state of mind is constant. This lockdown has also been a period of beauty, enthusiasm, loving joy, humor, even bliss. And there used to be a smidgen of guilt as well. For not contributing, for not sewing masks, for not supporting, for not donating, for not volunteering, for not being enough… in any way, in many ways.
Not that any of this is a competition. And I have never been a good competitor. I hardly ever feel invested in an end goal, a final prize… not even myself. This idea of doing something/anything as a means to become more evolved, more benevolent, more generous, more wise… doesn’t fully gel with me. I AM evolved, benevolent, generous and wise. I am also fearful, anxious, stubborn, and detached. And everything I do emerges from this unique, multi-colored space.
I have enjoyed this lockdown period immensely but I have also been rattled in strange, little ways. I have experienced dull evenings of scary, gaping emptiness, and I have savored blissfully cool, sunny mornings when my garden smiles back at me, and little seedlings happily unfurl their true leaves on the bathroom window sill. I have happily eaten every dish my creative husband has rustled up in our kitchen. I have had rough nights with dreams of chaos, restlessness. And then there is that rare morning when you wake up feeling weightless, so light and transparent, like a feather.
(I tend to believe that a LOT of how I feel is directly linked to the state of my digestion. So I attend to it as best as I can.)
My husband is a beautiful mirror, meaning he reflects what he sees without projecting. When you are a “blank canvas” type of personality, it is immensely helpful to have a partner who doesn’t splatter paint all over you. Perhaps that’s why this period of forced enclosure has not altered the quality of space in the relationship.
Contrary to what anyone (friend, partner, parent, media, president, prime minister, queen) says, our experience of life is fully and unequivocally our own, and it is an internal phenomenon. Life actually occurs on the inside, so no one can tell you what THAT is all about, and that includes the pandemic/Corona experience also.