My Pandemic (and How Was Yours?)

Here I am at last with a real live bunny, 2021.

Fourteen months in solitary confinement on the Divine Property. If anyone thought to ask me how I was I'd say, "It's not a lot different than normal, except Zooms took the place of meetings." Sometimes Zooms were okay and other times if people let their pets nose into the frame or talked at length about personal or family illnesses I would "Leave Meeting." Once in a while I'd suggest changing the subject or returning to the reason for the meeting, but on Zoom that sounds very rude. Listened to numerous instructive Zoom lectures and workshops; it helped if I did listening only.

Compared to many people I had it easy. No aged parents to visit through glass, or to die; no kids to home-school; I could pay my rent. About 10 people I knew died; this included three I counted as good friends. So sorry: Jean, Shirley, Peter. I went on a week's road trip and recently to a social gathering. We tried to talk about the year 2020 but no matter who we were and what happened to us we could barely remember it. It was a lost year.

I worked. I had a blizzard of work all the way up to the end of April 2021. When I was not working I gave myself work. Who knew when this would end? A vaccination appointment opened up on March 31. 

I still don't know how I feel, or how I got through it. I journaled every morning and as each notebook was filled I destroyed it.

This blog goes back to 2007. I think it's time to end it here. It began as a poetry/comedy blog. I haven't had those in me for a while although I did all I could to get them back, beg them back, force them back; they were my treasures. This morning, a gorgeous June morning leading into a gorgeous June day (there's still some left), I tried hard to photograph a marigold-colored butterfly among the marigolds, but did not get the photo. When I get good nature photos I tend now to post them to Facebook rather than here. Thank you for your Divine support over the years and may you fare well.

I Never Do That

About 6 p.m. I ordered vanilla ice cream for supper and savored every lick. At 8:30 p.m. I went to the mall I hadn't been to for years, and at the Godiva chocolate shop I've never been to, spent $24 on chocolates, which I certainly never do. Most of it went for a gift, but I bought a little golden box of two chocolates and ate them. I never do that. On the way home I stopped to buy a bagel for the next day. I never have bread in the house; too many carbs. At home finished up the day's pasta salad. I never eat pasta--too many carbs--except on Fridays. And I never eat after 7:30 p.m. because "it all goes to fat." Figured I'd just eaten chocolates so the whole day was blown, and after the pasta I went to bed.

Eudialyte, a mineral mined in Greenland

Up early, perfect 70-degree weather, and since I'd finished all my work couldn't decide how to spend the day. Mushroom hunting on a weekend morning would be elbow to elbow--I'll wait for a weekday after a rain. Walked in the woods for an hour, enjoying the morning freshness and spiderwebs sugared with dew. Persistent resentful thoughts clawed me so I put on a pendant made of the mineral Eudialyte, magenta, black, and golden, as a cure. Haven't bothered with pendants and crystals for years. Then I knew what I truly wanted: At the creekside on a shaded white-sand beach, next to a clutch of Virginia bluebells, I took boots and socks off, lay down in the cool sand, listened to the creek and the birds and a big granddaddy frog, and breathed. I almost never do that. My neighbor calls it "earthing." I lay there in peace, watching sycamore branches exercise in the wind, and a hawk riding thermals. I got a notion there to cook up the year's first hummingbird nectar and hang the feeders. They usually arrive around April 24, and for me (and lots of other people) it's an event, a holiday.

I savored a cup of coffee, filled and hung the feeders where I could see them from indoors, and on the porch in the lounge chair bought and downloaded a meditation app, although I never buy apps, and let it play, and breathed in and out, although it's all bogus and woo-woo and I never meditate. Then I looked around and marveled at the story-book-perfect weather. For lunch I split the bagel and stacked it with salami, which I never eat, with double the mayonnaise. Then I thinned my spring-onion crop and weeded some garden space I've neglected for nearly 10 years. Enchanted by the hum of 360-degree calm, peace, and satisfact I knew it'd get even better. Finally I sat down to work, and a hummingbird, the season's first, was at the feeder. --I'd had my day of celebration in advance.

It's Divine Tradition

Detail of the dome

As you enter

The faith I was raised in, Serbian Orthodox, you probably call Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox; they were so designated because back in the 11th century the Eastern Orthodox Church decided to use instead of Latin the local language of the people. We like color, brocade, gold, silver, ikons, incense, candles, stained glass, and lots of faces looking in at us from the next world -- that's what ikons are, windows into the spiritual world -- and that's why their artists fast and pray and paint them only when divinely inspired, and never sign their names. For these reasons we don't do mosaics.

St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Church in Phoenix hired three traditional-style painters from Serbia who worked on the walls and domed ceilings for several weeks at a cost of $130,000 to turn the church into a spiritual experience, and add notes in Cyrillic (and English, where it fit) so you know which of the hundreds of saints you're looking at. The effect is both riotous and harmonious, and the figures, larger-than-life-sized, are detailed down to the toenails; marvelous to see. This is my parents' parish. The liturgy is in Serbian, but the most important prayers and the sermon are repeated in English, for a service lasting two hours, which I spent gazing and marveling at the artwork (see, in the picture at right, the rainbow ring surrounding Jesus). How they made all these scenes and portraits fit, and how they even started to design it, is just about incomprehensible.