Love in the Time of Corona (Thank you, Barbara Jordan, for the title)

This morning after feeding the chickens, I went to check on the apple trees. They’ve come into bud and flower in the last week, and the flowers are so hopeful, so open, so nothing like the apples they will have become in the fall. 

They don’t smell like apples or like much of anything besides morning dew and hope. 

I miss my mom so much. I have missed her my whole life. 

Yesterday I was listening to an On Being episode with Rebecca Solnit. She was talking about how much she loves talking about hope, a belief and feeling she says is found in memory.

I have no problem living in memory: it’s the future that has me flummoxed. 

You can wish for someone to be more present with you; you can hope for deep connection. You can wake up early every morning hoping this will be the day everything changes and you finally bloom.

When you get little tastes of deep connection, you’ll bend over backwards for more. Give a child a taste of ice cream and then watch her chase you all over the house as you run away with the spoon. 

It’s so easy to confuse sweet with love. 

When I put my face close to the apple blossoms like I’m going to kiss them or eat them, I get the sense there is a sweet smell I am unable to experience. It’s like thinking someone is right around the corner even though you hear nothing, see nothing but corner. 

I created this life I am living by dreaming about it, writing about it, drawing it. When I do Write or Die with people, one of the exercises I have them do is to describe a photograph (it doesn’t have to actually exist—it could be a picture in your mind) of them at any age that would show me the essence of who they are. (I do this for a reason, but you have to take the class to find out. A girl needs to pay her bills.)

For me, I’m six or seven and I’m standing on the fence of the summer house we used to rent on in Menemsha on the Vineyard. I’m wearing a yellow nightgown and my hair is long and unbrushed. I’m watching the hippies across the stone driveway come out of the converted chicken coop. I can see them, long and lean, unwashed, brown, yawning, stretching, introducing themselves as a group to the day.

So now here I am in a converted garage, stretching, yawning, walking across the stone driveway to feed the chickens. Am I the girl watching or am I the hippies? Was I watching myself when I was a child? Or am I still her, alone, on the other side of the fence, watching? 

Is this it? Is this the full blossom? Have I fruited? 

The thing is I feel as if I’ve been living in reaction most of my life: not this, not this, not you. Not me. How can you fruit if you are not in deep relationship with the tree from which you sprung?

Annie Dillard wrote, A weasel is wild. Who knows what he thinks? He sleeps in his underground den, his tail draped over his nose. Sometimes he lives in his den for two days without leaving. Outside, he stalks rabbits, mice, muskrats, and birds, killing more bodies than he can eat warm, and often dragging the carcasses home. Obedient to instinct, he bites his prey at the neck, either splitting the jugular vein at the throat or crunching the brain at the base of the skull, and he does not let go . One naturalist refused to kill a weasel who was socketed into his hand deeply as a rattlesnake. The man could in no way pry the tiny weasel off and he had to walk half a mile to water, the weasel dangling from his palm, and soak him off like a stubborn label.

Where does this yearning to become unpryable come from? Can we direct it or are we drifting magnets seeking our match? I felt unpryable when I had my daughter, when I was raising her. I felt it when I decided to write a book, when I wrote it. I have felt it when doing the adoptee retreats with Pam, when doing my writing retreats. I’ve had it in shorter periods of time when I was out on my bike or out running or when I’ve known nothing could stop me. I have it when I’m coaching people to write their books. I’m hooked deep. 

When I was in my twenties and so lost in my life, I got addicted to driving across the country because I could sink into the drive, dedicate myself to staying in the car and moving forward. Once I got to Boston and two days later jumped back in my car and headed for L.A. because not driving was harder than driving--turning myself into an arrow aimed for a target was easier than pretending to live a life of meaning when the meaning was rumored to be somewhere around the corner. 

Being unpryable, being deeply dedicated to something is like finally turning into river. It’s like finding you can sing, dance, do a cartwheel. It’s like the shock and thrill of the first kiss when you discover the drug and magic of sinking into another person.  

I have the feeling the answer is in committing myself wholeheartedly to living in service to something bigger than myself, to spirit, to you, but I’m still afraid, still worried about my own needs: Will I be fed? Will I be able to afford my eye cream, my daily espresso? Will I get to do what I want to do? Will I be loved? Appreciated? Seen? Will I simple fade away into a life of weeding and giving eggs to strangers? 

There is the mother, and then there is the larger mother, the mother of us all. It’s so easy to focus on the small: the individual plant, the individual wave, this problem, that worry, when, pulled back, it’s all so gentle and slow. Ocean, land, planet, sky. 

Blossom, apple, weasel, hippie, little girl on a fence watching it all unfold, spellbound.