Playing for Time

Day 140 – 07/30/2020

It’s been rainy for a couple of days, starting with heavy fog this morning and morphing to rainfall once again. We bob along on the surface, trying not to just go through the motions like it’s Groundhog Day ad infinitum, but that’s an increasing challenge for me due to “the life of the mind.” BC [Before Covid], I spent most of my hours right here anyway, thinking thoughts and doing the daily, so the difference DC [During Covid] is in the nature of the thoughts. They’re circular, thus unproductive, and they’re relentless… figure this out, make sense of that, reconcile yourself to one unpalatable truth after another. I try to run them all through the Zen shredder before digesting them, for the sake of gut health, but their very insistence and the dearth of answers make each new 24-hours a maze to navigate from waking to sleeping.

Pretty sure this is why humans would rather not think about things too much, why comfortably numb is the preferred state of mind when life gets dicey… and life is always dicey. When your inner self gets to do her own thing, she comes up against pieces/parts that don’t fit… then what? If she goes around them, they’ll always be there serving as obstacles to other pieces/parts of life, so the only choice is to deal with them, which usually involves discarding something, and that’s when the fight starts.

Looking out at the mist hanging in the trees, I have one wish… that I had known the pandemic was on its way and would change life irrevocably for all of us. The heaviest shock, beyond the staggering death toll, is how it’s separated us politically, intellectually, and spiritually – a virus the whole planet is dealing with but Americans have managed to turn into internecine warfare.

There’s always blue sky somewhere, though, and often it’s right overhead, with the half-moon at its center.

Photo Credits: Kim Smith