How Much More?

Before I write anything, I think I would like to share some meditations from. YouTube that I have found helpful. I really like nature sounds and this one is rather interesting: a sandstorm. There is a video (brief and after the opening ad) which is a scene, ironically, of village residents going inside homes to weather out the sandstorm.





I want to say that my family, here and extended, is doing fine despite how difficult and troubling this time is. I have done a lot of brush-clearing and weeding, to the best of my ability, my body definitely reacting to this time in the world.

I feel so strangely that there was once a world, and that world is gone: for so long, I wore velvet skirts in winter, green and violet, one with little shisha mirrors (how I loved that they would flash in the sun!), dance at Congolese class on Sundays and then go write...long, delicious hours of writing when I would get caught-up in conversations, stroll through Bookshop Santa Cruz after. I had dance classes. I loved picking Thistle up from her school, look at the children leaving or entering school, the flowers Thistle and I care for in summer, the large and beautiful garden. Every summer, we cared for it, a magical and serene time despite the horror of our government. We can always find some pockets of serenity in a world not in our control.

But after March 10th, my rheumatologist told me I had to shelter in place, my body having been through far too much with lupus, my white blood cells permanently low from the chemotherapy I took from 2013-2016 to quell a raging flare up that was destroying my kidneys. I knew I would have to. Soon after, California went to shelter in place.

And for all of us, the world then changed, abruptly.

Now many of Santa Cruz’s businesses are shut. A friend reports that the downtown is a ghost town, as it was after the earthquake. Construction shut, some businesses still open for ordering by mail, or curbside pick-up of food. It is certain that Pacific Avenue (our downtown) will be very different when we emerge from our “caves,” as it were. The world will never be the same, because it can’t be. I try to prepare myself for this. I am nearly 61 years young and have never seen anything remotely like this!

What will the new world be like—how different, and how much like it was before? No one at all knows, yet, this great and perhaps terrible mystery.