The Blues

I realize, even in exile, that I inhabit a place of privilege and relative comfort during these Covid days, and I’ve been hesitant to write about my personal deprivations. The big picture is bad enough to render my own little disappointments trivial. But sometimes it gets to me, undeniably, and I have to admit I’m blue.

A few days ago I ventured into “town” for the first time since March 13. Mostly I wanted to go to the nursery and buy some plants, but I stopped at the consignment store to pick up a dress that hadn’t sold, and a hundred-dollar check for things that had. Masks were required, doors were open, and there were no other customers inside, but I still didn’t feel like browsing. The little pleasure in that is gone.

But what was so deflating was a conversation I had with the woman at the counter. I mentioned that I didn’t understand why some people are so resistant to wearing masks. Her reply (with her mask down around her chin) was that the masks don’t really help, and in fact make things worse. I said, no, they do help when properly worn–and, particularly when worn by both parties in an encounter, they provide demonstrably effective barriers. She said no, it has been proven that they are bad for our immune systems, and she’d be happy to point out a link to a study that shows this. I told her I was going with the advice of epidemiologists and health experts. Oh, she said, even the CDC agrees with me. The discussion was going nowhere, and my business was concluded, but her parting words to me, although meant as an olive branch, trouble me still:

Whatever. We can each believe what we want to believe, and we should do what feels comfortable to us.

But no, no, no...isn’t it about more than individual comfort? In a way, isn’t that “it’s-all-about-me” attitude exactly the underlying problem? And shouldn’t science overrule “feelings” in a pandemic?

This glimpse of reality was dispiriting. We headed to the nursery, which I was sure would cheer me up. We were greeted by arrows and barriers, a hand sanitizing station, a handful of customers walking in single file, an unexpected kind of hush. I resisted my usual lingering and meandering, my tendency to lean in and sniff, my fondness for a wander through the rows of roses and rambunctious strivers. I chose a bougainvillea in a gorgeous kind of purple (whose roots, we later discovered, are quite tenuous) paid the masked man who never smiled anyway, and had to admit that the whole experience had been joyless.

And who am I to expect joy anyway? Such a frivolous desire while the whole world is burning. And melting. And dying. And weeping. And crying out for change.

I’m not even going to mention the spectacle of the so-called RNC. Oh, I just did. There are no words to express the depth of my revulsion.

In the meantime, I have a grandson, and we cannot visit him. I’m blue about that, but nonetheless ecstatic about his presence in the world, so I suppose that negates the blue, or at least fades it from indigo to sky, or a pale baby-blue kind of shade. But oh, how I yearn to hold him!

Patience. That’s another part of this journey.

And speaking of journeys, having discovered that town is joyless, and having acknowledged that I am blue, I set out the next day for a proven antidote: an early morning walk with a friend. This particular friend is an unusually high energy, diligent, and inspiring woman. She walks briskly, but has mercy on me, and she knows the names of plants and birds, and she is not afraid to talk about the private struggles and wounds with which she grapples, as do we all, to one degree or another. She recently set aside her protective armor and bravely faced a very difficult personal challenge, and I’m proud of her for that.

“I’m thinking about the word surrender,” she said as we walked, which might sound like an odd comment, but not if you knew this friend. This led to an interesting conversation about surrender, submission, yielding, acceptance, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, and finding the light in the broken places and the strength in the ability to bend. I went home and looked to see if David Whyte had anything to say about surrender, and I found an excerpt from the transcript of a benediction he had offered at the 2018 On Being Gathering in Scott’s Valley, California, which, amazingly, I attended, just a few days before my little brain surgery adventure, no less. (Talk about vulnerability! I’d forgotten how closely those events were clustered. But I digress.)

Anyway, here’s David Whyte:

But it really is about a surrender; and it’s a surrender to the doorway that each of us has to walk through, taking the path of vulnerability into our future life...We tend to think of vulnerability as a kind of weakness, something to be walked around. But it’s interesting to look at the origin of the word, from the Latin word “vulneras,” meaning “wound.” It’s really the place where you’re open to the world, whether you want to be or not. You’re just made that way. You were just grown that way. You feel that way. You feel the pain of others that way, and you feel your own pain that way. And it’s actually interesting to think about it not as a weakness but as a faculty for understanding what’s about to happen and where you need to go — the ability to follow the path of vulnerability. And yet, as human beings, we’re constantly hoping that we can find a pathway we can follow right to the end, which will never disappear; where we won’t have our hearts broken. But anything you care about will break your heart. It will move out of your line of control and understanding at times.

Yes. Anything you care about will break your heart. And at the moment, pretty much everything we care about feels out of our control and understanding.

Hence, the blues. Inky blues.

And yet. You didn’t think I’d leave it there, did you? Even now, I am certain that my heartache, vulnerability, and yearning are teaching me, and even now, I believe that real transformation is unattainable without great pain. In this strange time, I hereby surrender to the mundane blues and the minefield of my own history with its veins of guilt and grief, but I shall yield as well to the inexplicable moments of euphoria, and a persistent belief that this is not how it ends.