Fragments: Journal of the PlagueYear 2020

Day 0: On the cusp of Shelter-in-Place order

Last face to face: visit with Capuchin directee leaving novitiate on way to catch last plane out

Online: arduous airline cancellations

Day Planner: Criss-cross pages with cancellations–travel, haircut, opera, lectures, dinner party, monthly spirituality class with Francis can novices…

Email: scan and send prepared handouts for OFM novitiate for them to do on their own.

Include Gestalt Continuum "Noticing Experience:"

….."Follow the spontaneous flow of your awareness: What are you aware of in terms of +bodily sensations +feelings +perceptions +mentalactivities…"

Day 1: Shelter-in-Place

Print news/internet news/radio news/TV news: Coverage of the pandemic exacerbates all my pent-up grief that roils to the surface: children ripped away from parents seeking asylum at the border; one hundred Americans killed daily by guns; ban on Muslim immigrants; attacks on synagogues; massacres at black houses of worship; ICE agents raiding homes; US withdrawal from UN Human Rights Council, human trafficking, desperate refugees crisscrossing the globe…

Having trouble bearing the accumulated heart hurt

Facetime: visit with my spiritual director. What is wrong with me? Just walk, she advises. Don't think.

Day 4: Walk: first white egret of the season visible across the mesa

Joy

Day 5: Mas ked and gloved delivery boy brings grocery order for N., our eighty-six year-old retired schoolteacher tenant whom I check on daily. He from six feet: "Well if you have to be quarantined, this is a great place for it. Big garden, privacy, short walk to remotemesa!"

Experience some "privileged"shame Not really helpful

Walk: from More Mesa cliffs overlooking the Pacific Santa Cruz Island stunningly clear as though telescoped into view Delight

Day 8: Mask and Glove: pick up Nikka Ramen to support local restaurant Podcast: Gratitude guru asked about being grateful in the present circumstances: "Be grateful you can breathe"

YES Thank you

Day 12: Walk: shoulder my way through damp corridor of wild mustard and radish stalks towering above me          Savor rustle of the stalks, chill dew on bare arms

YouTube: Bearded seventy-nine-year-old sage, author of Spiritual Unfoldment, interviewed by UK Conscious TV. He serene, looks only to the present, reminds that we all have to die sometime

Angerflares

Tell that to my late father who lost his mother to

the 1918 epidemic at age six. Tell that to my thirty-six-year old daughter

(the one with the hard luck history) quarantined in her postage stamp

sized apartment who just completed an arduous doctoral program

only to watch job interviews vanish with dwindling university enrollments

Day 15: Garden sit: Chalk white day lilies pop out….bloom,bloom,bloom….

Sweet scent

Marian Prayer Starter Card Quote: "All my fears vanish under your motherly gaze. Which teaches me to weep and to rejoice," Therese of Lisieux

Yes Both weep and rejoice As hard as that is

Day 17: Garden Stroll: The roses my late mother planted decades ago appear amidst more recent plantings          Sense of her presence comforts

Day 18: Facetime: Chaotic dinnertime "visit" with son, daughter-in-law, four-year-old, and twin toddlers in New Jersey. Son, director of neighborhood revitalization program that has transformed area, concerned for his many vulnerable undocumented residents: no health care, hourly wages lost or working in unprotected contexts, no rent relief, fear.

Injustice angers Helplessness in the face of so much suffering

ZOOM: My graduate students appear in a tiled gallery of apertures. Discussion of devotional Catholicism. One, from South Africa, dismisses this type of prayer as "magical," not transformative, real prayer.

Sometimes true, I think Not always Sometimes, sometimes the pain of the world,

the "mourning and weeping in this valley oftears"overwhelms.

Needs to be held by some presence greaterthan self

or one's own fashioned words or longing.

Sometimes the thickly packed words that have ripened over the centuries,

held the desires and hopes, born the sorrow of so many,

are the only ones that can carry such weight.

Begin novena to Our Lady of the Way

Day 19: Mask and Glove: 6 a.m...