Category: Coronavirus

A Guide to Your Vaccine Sorting Hat Horoscope: Everyday Magic, Day 1035

A Guide to Your Vaccine Sorting Hat Horoscope: Everyday Magic, Day 1035

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As more of us absorb the wizardry of the vaccine, where we end up might well be up to the whims of an enchanted sorting hat, just like in the Harry Potter books. Although it’s not a choice between Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin at Hogwart’s School, it’s not like we enter into the great hall of a high school gym or fairgrounds barn with much choice of which vaccine will live in us. The sentient sorting hat of our time is surely up to its pointy tip in overtime, determining whether we move to the Johnson and Johnson high rise or the Pfizer mansion.

So I started doing some research (aka making shit up), and I’m happy to share with you your horoscope for your vaccine house.*

Pfizer: You’re a person who needs to be as sure as possible, so you prefer to align with tried and true tradition and old money even if it was all tested long before current varieties of our time. You’re also quite delicate on occasion and tend to run cold, but nevertheless a strong contender. While most likely able to succeed winningly at all your endeavors, you don’t take to transitions well, particularly if you must endure heated delays of any kind. Your Achilles Heel is body aches. Your favorite color is royal blue, your most memorable meal is ice cream cake followed by espresso stored in dry ice, and your happy place is either the Arctic tundra or at a disco in Rio where the D.J. can’t stop playing Daft Punk songs. Your helper animal is either an illusive giraffe or a well-fed raccoon.

Moderna: You’re willing to be an upstart and take your chances, but you’re a product of nouveau wealth wanting the same security as the old money. You know how to make things happen quickly and how to outwit competitors, but you’re also prone to headaches and long naps more than you would like to admit. You generally like people and make friends at lightning speed. Your favorite color is dollar-bill green, you enjoy a Pina Colada (but not any songs about the drink), and your happy place is at Burning Man right before anyone has set up camp. Your animal, a de-scented skunk, travels with you everywhere you go although she has a mind of her own and often escapes to lurid night clubs instead of helping you transport your precious creations. You also enjoy long autumnal walks in New England, but only when you’re not working, which is never.

Johnson & Johnson: You’re a one-and-done maverick who’s willing to take your chances to get ‘er done quickly and easily. You’re also easy on the eyes. While you come from ancient tradition dating back to clan with names no one can pronounce, you’re not exactly a chip off the old horse even if the donkey is your protector animal. You believe in hard work and family connections, but you’re also practical enough to make a splash with doing things your own way. Your color is blood red, your bar order is either a gin and tonic or a Shirley Temple, and your happy place is at a refurbished tennis court at 6 a.m. in the Hamptons. Your idea of fun entails Lear jet flights back and forth over the U.S. while counting clouds and singing ABBA songs.

Astrazeneca: You have an international flair and a penance for adventure. Some might say you’re not reliable, particularly with younger people, but you’re a dark horse that may surprise us all. You have an amazing propensity to prove people wrong about your intentions although you do like to build followers on social media whenever you have a free moment. With a British father and Swedish mother, you know something about aging royalty, effective compromise, and also how to play multiple card games during hundreds of overcast days. Your color is orange, your favorite meal involves herring on toast, and your happy place is anyplace in Africa with a large urban population. Your animal is a happy puma.

*The first three vaccines are currently available in the U.S., and obviously there are more vaccine houses around the world to be considered, but my divination skills only go so far.

What is a Bad Year? What is a Good Year? Everyday Magic, Day 1024

What is a Bad Year? What is a Good Year? Everyday Magic, Day 1024

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A friend told me that during her Christmas Zoom with family scattered far and wide, she realized how lucky they were: no one had Covid, lost their life or their job, and all had warm homes with ample food and holidays delights within easy reach. The next day I saw a line rush by on Twitter: “You didn’t have a bad year if the worst you experienced was not being able to go on vacation.”

So who is having a truly bad year? One of my coaching clients found in her research that about one third or more of us are comfy and cozy with adequate employment and health (although these numbers are in flux). The rest of Americans are struggling with what the headlines sum up as unemployment or underemployment, food insecurity, and inadequate or non-existent healthcare — all of which push them into situations where they face greater risks of exposure to Covid.

No surprise, that people who face greater economic disparity, are communities (Black, Latino, Native American, and others — more here) with the highest percentages of coronavirus. Overlapping with this, anyone who tends to have a low-paying or minimum wage job — such as people working in restaurants, hotels, gas stations, etc. — can’t work from home….that is, if they’re working at all. The pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on young people and people in the service industry (who are sometimes one and the same). My daughter, who left a serving job a year ago, says that 80% of her server friends are out of work, which mirrors statistics I’ve seen.

Then there’s the pain we can’t measure with statistical data: those grieving beloveds lost to Covid as well as those living with long-term health impacts from the disease. When the pandemic came home to roost in March, I remember so many conversations with people about how strange it was to have something largely invisible wreaking such havoc. Now, for just about everyone I know, it’s all too real. A dear friend lost her husband last Saturday after weeks of him being intubated. One of my old high school pals’ mom died, isolated in a nursing home with no family to comfort her, a few weeks ago. Friends in Minnesota, family in Wichita, pals around town tell of how it was the sickest they ever felt or not so horrendous but very strange (and still no sense of smell and taste has returned) or they’re relatively over it, but now they have asthma for life. I know people who are long-haulers, meaning the virus comes back to send them to bed every few weeks or months. There are other stories any of us, some of those stories our own, could add to this list.

But it’s not just the pandemic making 2020 an agony of year for many people: there’s the record-number of fires in California and Colorado and many western states in between. Although my friends out yonder aren’t struggling to stay inside with all the windows sealed because of dangerous air quality right now, many of them know and see the impacts. Amazing ecological writer Barry Lopez, who died this week, lost his home to the fires after years of writing about climate change and its personal and collective impacts. There are thousands of people rebuilding or trying to rebuild after losing everything. It was also one of the most active and destructive hurricane seasons ever (more here) with so many people losing homes, businesses, and even their communities to flooding.

All of this is to say that there’s a big gap between those of us who are healthy, homed, and moneyed enough, even if we’re also holding the weight of collective despair, fear, and anger, and those of us living on or over the edge of poverty, home or food insecurity, grief and heartbreak. How we define good or bad is often a personal and idiosyncratic thing, but one thing we can likely all agree on: it’s been a year like no other, and the totality of 2020’s pain and suffering hurts any feeling person’s heart.

Many say that humans are at their best in the worst of times, and that seems true too. I’ve seen — and likely you have too — so many altruistic acts of love, such as Meg Heriford’s commitment to transform her diner into a place offering free, hot meals (good ones too) to anyone in need along with pantry boxes and blankets (see the Washington Post article on her here). People I don’t know have reached out on Facebook to support me and others. Those I see on walks in the wetlands wave and say hello, clearly smiling under their masks. Most of us have given more contributions to more good work this year than in the last decade altogether. Just the other day on a 3-hour call (don’t ask) with AT&T customer assistance, I had a heart-to-heart with a service rep in Indonesia who wanted to make sure, in addition to fixing an account issue, that I was staying safe and had eaten a good lunch. Tenderness is afoot.

Yet here we are, on the cusp of 2021, and where I am, the sky is clouding over and preparing to likely paint the world in snow. I welcome the peace, I’m grateful to be warm and well-cared-for, and I’m enthralled with and in love with all the goodness innate in us also.

A Solstice Like No Other: Everyday Magic, Day 1023

A Solstice Like No Other: Everyday Magic, Day 1023

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I am thinking of two realities: that over 300,000 people in this country have died from COVID-19 and that we’re on the cusp of the winter solstice, when the shortening days stop in their tracks, and from here on (until June 21) begin lengthening. Of course these two realities are contained in one reality that tells us we’re always swimming in change, but at this moment, such change feels even more poignant.

The vaccine is on the hoof and a new administration committed to facing the reality of the virus and doing all possible to address it is soon to take office. At the same time, just yesterday, an old friend’s mother died from the virus, another dear friend’s husband is intubated in stable but uncertain condition, and people all around are hurting, grieving, and recovering (or not).

Strangely enough, as we move toward the solstice, the weather has been sunnier, warmer, and less burdened in this part of the country. That tunnel of charcoal darkness I often felt trapped in each December isn’t happening this year, and instead, there’s socially-distanced walks in 50-degree days with friends, cleaning out the old car in the sunshine, and opening the door to let the doors in and out without an arctic blast.

Yet, yet, yet. There’s no reconciliation when it comes to big-time loss for so many people, especially when this country could have and should have done so much better if only our national administration took action at the get-go, coordinated with state and local governments, and lived out a consistent and non-politicized message about mask-wearing and other safety measures. There’s no way around this when a country with 2% of the world’s population has consistently had about 25% of the world’s coronavirus cases.

What really lingers isn’t the sense of failure and wall of data but the individual and personal pain. My friend who lost her mother writes of being bereft and also how you can’t truly understand what 300,000-plus dead means until you have a beloved in the count. This stays with me.

It also leads me to a prayer and poem — the prayer for all of us to climb over the hill of darkness and see, in the light emerging, new ways to grow our wings of compassion for those suffering, listening for what we don’t yet know, and witnessing of our collective grief.

The poem is one I wrote years ago but means a little more to me now when the world is about — I hope, I wish — to flip over to catch more of the coming light.

Winter Solstice: 4:22 p.m.

The blunt air morning-stark,

a glass light that levels everything,

makes me forget my intention for this or that,

the insistent hands home to roost

even if my walk is sodden.

Trees gleam like bronze etchings

rising from the cacophony of

cell phone rings, car tires’ turnings.

The night must have its way

even against the snow geese slightly lost

until they find their rut in the wind.

The solstice is a bird with feathers so black

they mirror the buildings, then lift

to land back to this date in time as if time

never left its perch. The motion of breath,

or a wayward finger tapping on the wooden desk

aged by light. The inward turn of stillness,

a slight sway as if standing on a bus, holding

tight to the bar when the wheels mount a sharp corner

and something completely new appears.

Solstice and then the world at this point

flips over, begins arming itself

with light.

Why I Won't Watch the Debates: Everyday Magic, Day 1018

Why I Won’t Watch the Debates: Everyday Magic, Day 1018

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Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten in Gaslight

Gaslighting. What a useful word that, when I first heard it, snapped a whole lot of abuse and shaming I suffered into a new and true reality. That’s because gaslighting is manipulating someone into questioning her take on the world, and at its most extreme, her sanity.

The term for this systematic psychological manipulation originated in Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 stage play Gas Light and was popularized in the 1944 film of the same title (starring Ingrid Bergman and Joseph Cotten). In Gaslight, a husband convinces his wife that she’s insane, mostly by incremental changes in their home, such as slowly dimming their gas lights while acting as if nothing has changed.

Having grown up with a father who constantly beat into me (by word and by hand) that reality was a land that didn’t include me or I obviously couldn’t even grasp, I grew up sensitized to many manner of experiences that reinforced gaslighting. Being a woman in a patriarchal culture with the added layer of working in academia for 33 years (which, even among spectacular educators and student-centered learning, has plenty of tiny gaslight villages) provided me with lots of grist for the mill.

I’ve been a teenager told her calling to be a poet was a pipe dream. I’ve been a young reporter, activist, non-profit employee, and faculty member told that her ideas were “interesting” with a patronizing chuckle or told I didn’t understand how things are because I was too young, female, naive, sensitive, intense, or other terms was used to put me on the shelf. As I developed new things that did mirror Reality with a capital R — such as Transformative Language Arts, which focuses on learning who we and our communities are through arts-based inquiry and experiential learning — I faced years of academic edition gaslighting, often manifested in men telling me what was and wasn’t real scholarship or the purpose of an education.

How many times have I and so many of us (especially if you’re female, LGTBQ, living with serious illness or disability, a person of color, or low income) sat in rooms where someone *calmly* and *logically* mansplained to us why what we asked or said was irrational, unrealistic, impossible, or just crazy-wrong? How many times have we heard “Let’s not let our emotions run away with us” by someone who was backhoeing in made-up rationale actually based on their emotions and on burying our spirits? How many times have we heard we’re too much or not enough?

Even writing this post, I realize my hands are shaking and my heart is racing because I — like so many of us — have had to endure people in power trying to turn down the gas lights of my own and so many others’ innate power to create, speak our truths, and live authentically. Make no mistake about this: gaslighting is all about power. It’s designed to take away, diminish, or otherwise obliterate our power to believe in ourselves, to speak and act for change, and to feel the full weight of our voices and visions.

Which brings me to why I won’t watch the debates.

The two specimens from the party in office exemplify two sides of the gaslighting coin. One screams, belittles, sabotages, name-calls, changes course in a split-second, and yells some more. The other talks steadily wearing a mask of calm logic completely impenetrable to all reality except for a fly landing on his head. Both divert, obstruct, talk over others, and are obviously convinced that any agreed-upon rules or norms don’t apply to them. They also both use the formula of lie, deny, and repeat multiplied exponentially until they and their followers believe what they say is as solid as bedrock.

I’m not saying the challenging party is perfect, but they are talking some undeniable reality: Yes, climate change is real. Yes, Covid-19 is far more deadly than the flu, and hey, America has 4% of the world population, and over 20% of the cases of this lethal and, if you survive, potentially life-long disease. Yes, people of color are systematically targeted by many police departments, and they die and suffer at much higher rate due to racism, the pandemic, and economic disparities.

I believe that the debates are important in showing us more of what this next election is truly about, and they can be helpful in both mobilizing the base (for both candidates) as well as helping undecided voters decide. But as someone who is a recovering gaslight survivor, I have left and will leave the room each time they’re on, taking long, slow deep breaths, reminding myself that I’m not in any danger at this moment, and opening my heart to all of us who have been told there’s something deeply wrong with who we are and what we know. And I will tell us now and again: you are enough.

Who is That Masked Poet?: Everyday Magic, Day 1010

Who is That Masked Poet?: Everyday Magic, Day 1010

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I never felt like much of a vigilante before, but lately, I can’t help myself. After shopping at our very safe food co-op where everyone was wearing masks except for one young family, I eyed said family in the parking lot, right next to where I would be returning my empty cart. “Should I?” I asked myself, followed by, “Why not?” I gingerly walked over to them, standing 10 feet away of course, and cheerfully said, “Hey, please wear masks next time. The numbers are going up, and we want everyone to stay safe.”

One of them looked away like this masked poet with messy hair in old bike shorts and a tie-dyed shirt was crazy, and the other shot hate rays from her eyes. I shrugged and headed back to my car, once again unsure if speaking up is going to change anything in a world where so many people are actively embracing stupidity, carelessness, ignorance, denial, or something else that eludes me. But then that’s the job of being a masked poet: speaking up and spreading awkwardness, then speeding away quickly.

Not that I always have the nerve to say something: when traveling through Missouri to get to a relatively safe harbor in Arkansas (writers’ colony where I would inhabit thoroughly disinfected rooms without having contact with other humans), I had to stop at numerous gas stations, thanks to a small bladder and a whole of iced ice. Did I see anyone working anywhere who had a mask? Of course not, and the only exception to the maskless were three women coming out of a bathroom. I wanted to shoot my fist in the air and yell, “Right on, sister!” Furthermore, the good working people of quick shop world looked at me like I was from outer space because of my mask. I got back in my car and pumped more sanitizer on my hands.

Coming back through Kansas, I still didn’t encounter any people donning masks, except for the employees at a very mechanized Taco Bell, who passed my burrito to me through a plexiglass contraption, which I appreciated. But at least the older woman I saw stocking cigarettes in southeast Kansas smiled at me and called me “Honey.”

Then there’s the grocery store encounters that led me to write to two national chains, one for a store where half the employees wore their masks pulled down under their noses, and another where the manager had his mask hanging around his neck. My polite but pointed conversations with them didn’t go so well, and in one case, I had to ask a woman, much older and likely much more at risk, to step back when she got face-to-face with me. At least one of the chains (Aldi’s) took my complaint seriously, and we had a prolonged conversation about how people working there needed more education (my point — I didn’t want any of these front-line workers fired).

I know masks are a hassle, and I struggled mightily with my glasses fogging up until I found some tricks that worked for me (the right-sized mask for the face, and making sure the top of the mask is tight and secure), but I’ve noticed I’m actually getting used to wearing a mask. Back in March (many years ago, it seems), I rushed through grocery aisles just throwing anything in my cart in an effort to get outside in a hurry and get the mask off. Now I’m relatively okay with my nose and mouth under layers of cloth.

I also realize those of us who aren’t front-line workers only have to endure little bouts of maskfulness. My son Forest, who works 40 hours each week at our food co-op, has to wear his mask for eight hours at a time. People working in hospitals, doctor offices, clinics, restaurants, manufacturing, and so many other industries have had to seal up half their face as a way of life.

Although I’m mostly home, just edging out once a week, I’m astonished at what I keep seeing. Some of my friends say it’s just too much for people to accept that the old normal isn’t coming back around for longer than they can endure. One friend equated our relationship with the pandemic to grief: we keep cycling through all the stages, and some people are especially at home in denial or anger. Whatever the case, I’m dumbfounded as to why everyone isn’t building their mask wardrobe.

There’s a well-worn saying among many of us about speaking truth to power, and while asking people to wear masks isn’t quite a same, it feels like something, if we can do it without evoking defiant reactions (which I’m surely not often successful in), is worthwhile. After all, given all we’re learning about the truth of what helps prevent the virus (masks!), we do have the power to be what my people call mensches: decent humans. Let’s mask up and use our power!