The First Word...

The first sunset of the new year...

 

2020 has been and come and still IS, though these days, we call it 2021.

We're 43 days into the new year, 338 days into the Pandemic.

Covid-19 still dominates our lives.  The restrictions feel looser.  It's more like looking over your shoulder for the Boogie man instead of staring eyeball to eyeball at that monster. The Coping has become second nature but still feels like an ill-fitting coat with a tag scratching the back of my neck rather than a made-to-measure suit that fits like skin.

There are still limits as to what we can and cannot do.  

We can go for walks, go to the grocery store, make a quick run to a bookshop for a pre-booked, solitary 20 minutes to touch a cover with gloved hands.  We continue to mask, a word that has morphed into a verb rather than a noun. 

We can expect to receive the vaccine at any time now, too.  But good luck finding an appointment!  We can expect things to wend their way back to some new kind of normal.  Soonish.  

What we cannot do?  

We cannot attend the wedding of a precious niece.  

We cannot gather to mourn the passing of a beloved aunt, uncle, cousin, friend.  

We cannot return to our classrooms, yet we are verbally abused on a daily basis by those who wouldn't dream of going back themselves but who are desperate to be released from the "burden of having to home school" their own kids.

We cannot gather, stand close by or hug others, even to comfort or wipe away tears.

So that's where things stand right now.

At the stroke of midnight, 2021, I am ready for something new.  

That first day of the new year is spent lazing in front of a blazing fire reading Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, with one part of my brain, while having a good think about writer's block and why I haven't been able to use the Covid time to write more or something or anything at all.   While my brain is duly occupied, I keep having a-ha moments, bright bubbles of sudden understanding between the book and my thoughts that make something in my own experience ring true.  These bright bubbles, I suddenly realize, are the openings, or the doorways to my own stories.

That connection between reading and "bright bubbles" came to life in 2020, which turned out to be a banner year for reading but not so much for writing.  With wide swaths of time on my hand and a need to ward off the "Black Dog" who always lies in my shadows, I took to reading.  Reading is a very good way to escape.  Then, I introduced Audible into my reading toolkit to make the most use of my walking and gardening time.   The final piece of this little threesome, arrived because I couldn't go to the bookstore to browse, so I began to rely on sources like Lit Hub.   Lit Hub exposed me to essayists, who introduced me to a whole genre of untouched material called non-fiction!   And non-fiction appeals to my present state of mind perhaps because I want Truth, or something that closely resembles it.  Or perhaps what's going on in the world is too close to a fiction I don't want to invite into my head.  

So between Audible, the change in reading material, and the ample time to walk, garden and read, I discovered a tendency that's probably always been so.  It seems that my mind drifts off from the passage and into my imagination. One minute I'm reading, and the next I'm heading down a rabbit hole of thought and since you just never know where you're going to end up, off I go willingly.  There have been times that I break out of this revery realizing I have been frozen still, spade in hand staring in to the middle distance with a daft glazed look long enough to be stiff or for my husband to come out to check on me!  Meanwhile I have been busy making those "text to self" connections where a memory fires up and takes over and I become lost in my own story-telling adventure.  

These are the "bright bubbles."

And I'm off in hot pursuit after them.

For in these bubbles lies my own voice, the one I've been looking for.

~February 14, 2021