Trusting the Process: Getting There From Here

It has been quite a long time since I began this fledgling blog. Perhaps its time has arrived. Like everyone else immersed in the COVID19 Pandemic I am trusting the process that will allow a constantly mutating virus* to die out – if people will pay attention to science and protect themselves from becoming host to it. I am also trusting the process of going inward, simplifying my life, while engaging in ways that make sense in relation to members of my varied and widely separated communities. While all life on our planet is interconnected within rippling waves of cause and effect, each of us is experiencing this tragedy in unique ways. As Dr. Maya Angelou expressed, “Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better.” Potent words for the present.

(*Update 5.18.20, Good news, my scientist friend said that it has been determined this particular coronavirus in not the type that mutates, like the common cold. See this article from The Scientist.)

In the weeks that the immense dangers finally became acknowledged and addressed in the United States I adapted a different blog (MaherMatters) and posted “off topic” there. I also began to make fabric face masks for a long list of individuals around the country. That list continues to grow and marks my weekly visit to the Post Office with some sense of purpose and usefulness. Among many other activities, mask-making has helped me to focus, like an aspect of Karma Yoga. See my previous posts through these links:

• Saturday, April 25 – Earth Day in a Pandemic (with an Addendum today)
• Sunday, April 12 – Shine A Light
• Monday, April 6 – It’s Mask-Making Time
• Friday, March 27 – Time Out

While so many have been seriously, catastrophically affected by loss during this time, so many others are front-line responders and essential workers and an outrageous number of people have died, it is a privilege for we who are actually able to stay and work from home. We may, nonetheless, also experience emotional upheavals as an avalanche of dire news events of the days persists while we are stricken by our new and unwelcome mask-wearing, non-touching reality. Given that not all upheavals are equal, each must still be faced as it occurs and transformed into something greater—greater than the virus, greater than those who willfully do harm.

Artists, writers, performers, scientists and others whose vocations are inwardly-driven may have an easier time of this. Our own work and endless curiosity provides no lack of something to do, even as such vocations are financially precarious even in the best of times. Ironically, the great gift of time having been given in full while we hunker down by command allows us to work in ways that ordinarily must be fitted around the edges of juggling myriad other requirements within the world of making a living. While parents, conversely, have more than usual on their plates, many have welcomed ways to engage their children in their work-lives, and children have grown in ways that quarantine time has made possible as conventional structures are being reinvented. Creatives and scientists have continued to provide inspiration, explanations, encouragement, guidance and hope for me as the Internet has functioned in ways for which it was initially, positively, intended.

With this reentry into Trusting the Process: Getting There From Here, I intend to offer links to anchors of inspiration that have lifted my spirits or informed me during what I fear will be a long road ahead. I hope you’ll enjoy them, will share your own thoughts, and will subscribe.

©2020 Janet Maher