2020

‘Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future.’ —Charles Eisenstein

1. Gentle Delusions

This summer my Covid safety decisions ranged from the cautious, to the gently delusional, to the completely irrational—magical thinking on steroids. I navigate through a perpetual fog, constantly weighing and measuring my every move. Despite my best intentions, I am often unreliable.

The complexities of life have been at once compounded and simplified for all of us during this Covid summer. We have to do more thinking about every single thing even while we are living smaller. I have a hard time regulating the intensity and meaning of things because everything—even the simplest of things—feels so damn complicated (Where the heck is my mask?!) It’s exhausting.

My husband and I finally named a metric, something to capture this ennui so that we could talk about it: we call it the Exposure Risk Factor (ER for short). We use a scale of 1-5 to help us to decide what we can and cannot safely do during this pandemic to keep us both out of the actual Emergency Room.

‘Does this friend have a high ‘ER’ due to his job?’ That’s a 4—maybe pass on seeing him right now and visit via facetime. ‘Is a hike a safer ‘ER’ choice than attending a ‘small, safe birthday party’? Outdoor activity is a solid 1—most definitely. We feel like we have a certain number of statistical chits to spend, and we try to ‘budget’ accordingly.

Indeed, it’s a gentle delusion—this crazy Covid yellow line we follow—but at least it is something to steer by as we travel through this foggy miasma.

2. Proactive Acts of Faith

I spent the summer in Vermont’s NEK noticing how the idea of ‘gentle delusion’ thinking quietly infects my judgment process. This played out on the bike path I watch during my morning writes. I have a cast of characters that parade by who tickle my curiosity on a daily basis. I’ve learned that I have deep prejudices about everything—age, sex, race for starters—and that I’m pretty much living in a perpetual state of gentle delusion.

There is a woman, maybe late sixties, who reminds me of my beautiful friend Jean. She has a sparkling smile and is very fit—a speed walker. She blows by a couple of times a day on the four-mile route. My gentle delusion: ‘I can only imagine what ‘Jean’ is walking off, but it strikes me that her intensity is mirroring some kind of anxiety. Maybe this walking thing is her vaccine against the terrors of the pandemic—or maybe she even has an exercise illness.’ The simple truth: maybe ‘Jean’ just really enjoys walking by the lake.

Then there are ‘The Barracudas’, a couple of younger Asian women who walk rain or shine, like clockwork. Despite daily sightings, they are not friendly. There is an intensity to their walking: they do not move over or give six feet of consideration to anyone. While the Mrs. Kravitz in me finds this infuriating, my gentle delusion is this: ‘These women have suffered more than many during Covid due to the incendiary rhetoric of our President, and the resulting putrid haze of xenophobia that has settled over our country. Maybe their refusal to give way is a declaration of independence, a protest during a difficult time.’ The simple truth: maybe they are just a couple of self-absorbed talkers.

My favorite gal is Heather. She is a feisty fit cyclist who blows by five or six times a day somewhat manically shouting out greetings of hello and happiness. Heather is newly retired, and new to our bike path ‘hood, but everyone already knows her name (by contrast, I’ve been here for sixty-two years and no one knows my name.) My gentle delusion: ‘Wow, Heather seems like someone who is filled with the holy spirit, specially delivered to lift our own spirits during this pandemic. She greets every single person down the path, right side and left side, with a huge smile—her joy provides a contagious antibody to the nasty Covid-19.’ The simple truth: maybe Heather is just re-living the joys of her former career as a flight attendant—pretzels or cookies anyone?

It all reminds me of the line from Hamlet: ‘Nothing is ever good or bad but thinking makes it so.’ I think I need some mental girders to help keep me from being less judgmental during this pandemic—of others and of myself. Some kind of a soundbite to name this energy and give it a more productive intention. I see my casual, lazy stereotyping as a gateway to more entrenched prejudices. I am trying out an ‘antidote’ for this unproductive pattern of thinking.

The words ‘Proactive Acts of Faith’ just popped into my mind one day.

While we await a vaccine, I’m growing my own through the power of curiosity. I’m dedicating this period of suffering to awakening more compassion for others, and for myself by committing Proactive Acts of Faith. I start with the simple: being curious and asking open-ended questions; learning the true stories of others; giving folks the loving benefit of the doubt; supporting people’s fluctuating moods, choices, and comfort levels with Covid. These are not complicated gestures they are simple graces. They are about abandoning assumptions so that I can harness my scattered energies and charge them with something kinder and more enlightened during this difficult time.

Postscript: In the past two weeks I have greeted and spoken (10 feet away!) to more people on the bike path than I have done in two decades. The energy that I have stingily been storing away in my tidy little judgment vault has been released and compounded exponentially as a result. I have met the loveliest people, and I have listened to their true stories. I feel more connected and less delusional. My vaccine seems to be working—so far!

3. BIPOC

The Black Lives Matter movement shook us out of our heads like a 9.5 Richter scale earthquake this summer; it was nothing short of mind-blowing for my little white world. I live in the whitest state in the nation and can count on one hand the number of BIPOC folks I interact with. Yet, in my gently delusional, liberal mind, I’ve arrogantly assumed that I was living bigot-free—ha! Despite the fact that I do have some level of consciousness in practice (I have an Arab son-in-law and half-Arab grandson) all of my delusions are Just. So. Ignorant. I’d never really registered the term ‘anti-racist’ before this summer. I have so many miles of intellectual and spiritual travel to go to even glimpse, let alone grasp, the realities and challenges that people of color deal with every moment of every day. To grow my awareness so that it might make a modicum of difference someday is merely a starting point.

The more we all awaken to the vast network of racism inherent in our systems, the faster we will find ways to restructure our society to everyone’s benefit. A current real-time example of racism in play is highlighted by Ala Stanford, MD, a pediatric surgeon and founder of the Black Doctors Covid-19 Consortium. Black Americans are dying from Covid at a rate two to four times higher than other populations. Dr. Stanford recently shared her thoughts about the race disparities with Color of Coronavirus. She said she witnessed every day in the community the discrepancies that lie behind these sobering statistics.

My journey has begun with books riding shotgun. My book club read Waking Up White by Debby Irving last spring, a prescient choice. Still Here by Austin Channing Brown was a good place for me to begin in earnest this summer. Brown’s podcast with Brené Brown is an excellent introduction to this BLM thought leader. I am now expanding my podcast choices to include more BIPOC guests. I’m asking for clarifications and guidance within my family.

After reading How To Be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, daughter Quinn, has me diving into Me And White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad. She says the biggest learning moment for her in the book was this: ‘I hope you can understand that I can be hurt by this interaction while also understanding that it wasn't intentional. Those two things don't need to be mutually exclusive.’

Read. Listen. Learn. Practice. Fail. Try Again. It’s not a coincidence that the BLM movement and a pandemic are happening concurrently. The global consciousness we need to achieve to eradicate racism feels like the ready-alert skills we are currently learning and implementing during Covid:

1. We must remain constantly aware and informed

2. We must be willing to cooperate and do uncomfortable things

3. We must put into place standards and practices to combat it

4. We must be vigilant against permitting it to infect and overtake us

5. We must be consistently alert to its’ insidiousness and potential destructiveness

6. We must be generous and consider what is the highest good for all

It’s a 24/7 practice, a way of being. These are some small steps I can make towards contributing to the growing BIPOC energy in Vermont. Education, conversations, and a wholehearted intention toward awakening are the good kind of contagious; these baby steps are my Proactive Acts of Faith.

4. Bone Up on Broth

You are what you eat—so don't be fast, cheap, easy, or fake. We’ve all got more time to cook now, and summer’s been one wonderful tomato salad after the next, but as we head towards autumn, I’m feeling the urge to stockpile items that will support my overall health during the dark days ahead.

The simplest and most effective way to nurture the body and boost our immune systems during Covid is to focus on nutrient dense eating: seasonal whole foods—mostly vegetables, fruits, grains—and some clean protein. I’ve added local organic chicken to supplement my diet this summer, and I am using the leftover frozen carcasses to make a rich, delicious, and affordable 24-hour bone broth.

Bone broth is the big buxom sister to simple stock. Bone broth, aka ‘liquid penicillin’ is legendary as a superfood because of its high concentration of vitamins and minerals. Bone broth heals and seals the gut, protects joint function, boosts collagen—the building block for all cellular support, including our brains—and supports bone integrity, among a bevy of other health benefits.

In her excellent book, Prime, Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary, Ayurvedic expert and devout vegetarian, so believes in the power of bone broth that she makes an exception to her plant-based diet by adding daily doses of it.

To nourish my resiliency during Covid, I am drinking straight up shots, cooking it into grains and soups, and sipping a warming toddy before dinner. I also freeze ‘to-go’ containers in the event that someone I love falls ill and needs a simple, nutrition-rich food to sip while healing. It’s something I can do; it’s a Proactive Act of Faith.

Method:

Pack one large leftover roaster (or two small), with skins, cooked bits, and bones into a 7-quart Crockpot. Cover it with water, add 1-T of vinegar, a small pinch of salt, and a few peppercorns. Add 10-15 peeled garlic cloves.
Next, move the crockpot unit to a safe, stable surface in the garage and turn it on high (I don’t love the smell of pungent cooking 24/7 inside my home)
At the 24-hour mark, turn off the Crockpot and let the broth cool for an hour or so. Set a large mesh strainer into a very large bowl in the sink and strain the broth into the large bowl. Discard the chicken dregs. When the broth is cool, store portions in freezer-friendly containers (2-4 cup servings). A layer of yellow fat will form—many people love to fry with this prize. I remove most of the fat for drinking the broth because it’s very rich in calories and can cause heartburn.

5. The Cadence of Connection

My husband and I have been ‘Coviding’ together for over six months now and we have found a new benchmark in our thirty-seven-year old marriage. Most notable is that two formerly very independent people have plunged into a new pattern of interconnected life that we thought would happen only with the onset of retirement (which is being postponed indefinitely—Jeff loves his work.) Our former motto was ‘For better, for worse, but never for lunch.’ Now that he’s working permanently at home, it’s been revelatory (and there have been a lot of nice lunches!)

Pre-Covid, we lived our weekdays without a sighting and saved up our chat for the evening fireside. Now, we are bumping into each other every fifteen minutes—with updates! We have morphed from our daytime ‘me’ and evening ‘we’ into a 24/7 ‘MWe’. And it’s surprisingly okay—pretty great, in fact.

Yup, Me plus We = MWe. This is an actual term coined in 2018 by Daniel Siegel, MD, author of the prescient book Aware: the Science and Practice of Presence. “It is the inner ‘I’ to an integrated self, a ‘MWe’ that combines the differentiated inner ‘me’ within the body with the inter ‘we’ in our connections with people and the planet.” Here, Seigel is predicting the gift of Covid’s planet-wide consciousness raising.

As Jeff and I are experiencing this uber-connection on our micro level—the population of the planet is experiencing some variation of this quarantine theme on the macro level. This is an opportunity for all of us to broaden and deepen our awareness of our newly integrated way of living in the world as we contribute to this collective energetic experience—hopefully to affect massive positive change.

Heartbreaker: separated since March. This photo is the embodiment of the pain and havoc that Covid has wreaked on all of us.

This summer I learned that Covid is teaching us a better value: we are not solo, single, or truly independent—that is a gentle delusion we once practiced. We are MWe—bound together by our humanity; we are inter-connected by a powerful universal force and we might want to start appreciating that, sooner than later.

While we endure friendship’s ‘quiet season’ my Proactive Act of Faith this summer has been to make at least one wholehearted connection each week with someone I haven’t seen much since Covid began. Connecting via a phone call, facetime, or a social distance walk.

It took some extra energy—energy that I often feel I do not have right now—but when I did commit to it, the benefits to both of us, emotionally and psychologically, have been very rewarding. Covid randomly infects our energy levels with a foggy flu feeling—we are in a perpetual state of disappointment and grieving. A ‘MWe’ devotional practice can provide an excellent vaccination against this pervasive ennui—these feelings of loneliness and despair don’t get to rule our quarantine days.

6. Adventure of the Heart

I usually love to travel for my late summer birthday, but this year was different. To bridge the gap my darling daughters organized a Zoom Tarot Reading Party for us to gather. Tarot is a powerful portal into the spiritual realm, and we are devotees.

It was a virtual world-wide adventure: our tarot medium, Samantha, lives in Lima, Peru; Quinn is in Reno; Kate in Ohio; Tuckie dialed in from Williston, while I was in NEK, VT. It was so fun seeing all of my girls on the screen and we found ourselves in expert hands as Sam astonished us with her powers, knowledge, and skill at Tarot. The cards were hot and we learned a lot! The wide eyes and giggles attested to the truth in the prophetic readings—and it was an experience we plan to repeat. We have a recorded version as well, which will be wonderful to review during autumn’s darker days. For anyone who is tarot-curious check out Samantha Lewis for more information.

7. Media Metronome

Probably the most surreal media experience—besides the daily bombardment of the actual news—I had this summer was the day that I watched a confluence of major sporting events: the Kentucky Derby, The US Open, and the Tour De France all in one Covid-filled day on TV. WOW, the surreal swirl we live in.

We are finding great numbing comfort during Covid with daily TV series dates. I love the prescribed anticipation of retiring each evening with a show that will sweep me away from the reality of what I’m really missing: authentic interactions with a variety of people I enjoy, and an informative news cycle. Here are some of my favorite non-violent and entertaining TV shows/movies that I loved this summer:

Little Fires Everywhere (Hulu)

Halt & Catch Fire (Netflix—fav!)

Better Things (Hulu)

Love in the Time of Corona (Hulu)

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (Netflix)

Rake (Netflix)

The King of Staten Island (Amazon)

While We’re Young (Prime)

I read a ton of fiction this summer, check out my complete list of titles in the photo at the top of this blog. I tackled Joyce Carol Oates latest tomb, Night, Sleep, Death, The Stars—eight hundred pages about a seemingly perfect family and their rotten undercarriages. Wow, can that lady write! Oates is not only one of the world’s most prolific writers, every one of her books is very generously laden with a quantity of quality words. At times I found the book’s length somewhat tedious, but when I was finished, I could not stop thinking about the story and each one of the family members; that is a hallmark of excellent writing, I think.

If you are an Ann Patchett fan, like me, you’ve probably read all of her books. I loved her most recent The Dutch House I stumbled on an old copy of her short story collection that I had somehow missed: This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage. This collection is warm, savvy, and personal and I was very sad when I finished this fine book. I envy you the read.

Grace Note

This summer I learned that I have Meniere’s Condition (I refuse to call it a disease.) I have been struggling with severe bouts of vertigo that began in December 2017 and have progressed to all four symptoms for a diagnosis: unpredictable vertigo attacks, ear fullness, significant hearing loss, and perpetual ringing in the ear—tinnitus (pronounced tin-nu-thus). I’m not happy about this, at all. This is a rare and chronic condition with diminishing prospects and few effective interventions. It sounds sobering. I intend to heal my way through it, starting with surrendering: to the protocols, to the rules, to the Universe, to it ALL—and then? I am going to kick Meniere’s ass.

I now have a hearing aid for my right ear, and I take a daily diuretic medication for reducing sodium in my body, plus I try to eat low-sodium foods whenever possible. I’ll never drink alcohol again, which has worked out fine by me for the past three years. In addition, I have to tightly budget my beloved salt, and limit a trifecta of favorites: coffee, chocolate, and sugar. So far, I’m doing well—I’ve been able to mountain bike and hike with no compromises and I enjoy most of the things I usually do—perhaps even more than I did before. I often get tired or overwhelmed easily and I need to make sure I meditate in the afternoon—or my head fills up like a balloon.

I feel the worst for my right ear: hosting the hearing aid, holding the mask, and my glasses—that has taken a long time to get use to! Downscaling my enthusiasm and energy for everything is the hardest part, but the longer I can defer the next vertigo attack, the longer my brain has to recover from the trauma of the last episode. I’m getting better at saying ‘No. Thank you.’ and advocating for myself.

One thing Meniere’s has taught me is to stop multi-tasking—I simply can’t. My three-track brain is now a one-beam train, and while I mourn the loss, I am learning to appreciate what mindfulness is really about, and it’s growing on me. I am feeling more tuned in to the precious and profound that surrounds me. When I fall back into my old patterns of behavior, a hot mess is sure to follow—witness a text debacle I had with my daughter yesterday. I have learned to ask for help and for forgiveness. Meniere’s is here to help me grow spiritually, and while I am a slow learner, I AM paying attention.

My Proactive Act of Faith is to become fully informed about Meniere’s and to connect with others who might be suffering and feeling isolated by the dearth of information available out there—please contact me at my link below.

I’d love to hear from you—feel free to send your comments to me!