The Old Dance Over,
New Dance Coming Soon
Eight Lessons from the Lockdown
The Old Dance Over,
A New Dance Coming Soon
Eight Lessons from the Lockdown
A New Dance Coming Soon
Eight Lessons from the Lockdown
I’ve been sheltering in place for seven years. That’s right, seven years.
No relaxed stroll down Western Avenue into downtown Petaluma. No decaf latte at the Apple Box. No chile rellenos at Mi Pueblo. Not the latest Helen Mirren film at Boulevard Cinemas, nor a Phil Lesh concert at McNear’s. Not even lunch or dinner at Al’s or Sue’s (actually, visiting the homes of friends I just did figure out).
Yes, sheltering in place for seven years.
The reason? In 2010, I got seriously slammed upside the head: not the suddenness of a car accident, but a slow-burn brain injury from chronic carbon monoxide poisoning. For weeks, the exhaust fumes from the home’s gas heater were spewing toward our nearby hot tub – the tub that only I was using. One brain misfortune morphed into another: by 2012, I developed severe electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), which took me a year to self-diagnose (no, I hadn’t heard of it either; and I’m a doctor.) Now, seven years later, I still can be “zapped” – usually by a rogue cellphone – but this happens less often, and the reaction caused is less severe. But when it does happen, a mind-dimming fog will roll in over hours, not to recede until the next day.
Tens of thousands of dollars later, my home has become an electromagnetic sanctuary. Within its four walls, levels of both regular electric fields and high frequency radio-waves are a tiny fraction of those found in most other homes. But to make this strange life of mine work – to avoid being poisoned by yet another cellphone – I have to live as a recluse. And when I do go out, I must hide inside a weird head-covering made of silver mesh and aluminum screening – not nearly as dashing as some of the masks you see around town these days.
Yes, sheltering in place—I know it oh so well. As a friend of mine said recently: “Now, everyone’s having to Pull a Scott”. Indeed. Welcome to my world.
In spite of this electro-malady, I continue to have a rich work-life: I’m a writer, a hospice physician, a wilderness guide, and a life transitions counselor. I do most of this from home, except obviously the wilderness work. This is all made possible, oddly enough, because of the great electromagnetic miracle of artificial connectivity: phones, emails, internet sites and, increasingly, videoconferences. With so many others now sheltering, too, my connections with the outside world suddenly exploded, as the world began asking more of me than it had in nearly a decade. All of these connections have granted me the blessing of hearing many private stories (and internet ones, too): stories about how other people are coping – or, in some cases, crumbling.
I’d like to offer eight lessons I’ve learned. Some of this is drawn from seven years of solo sheltering, and some comes from this time of collective hunkering down. I draw upon all of me: of course, the writer; but also, the electro-sufferer; the hospice doc; the wilderness guide; and the life transitions counselor. It is with the last that I start.
No relaxed stroll down Western Avenue into downtown Petaluma. No decaf latte at the Apple Box. No chile rellenos at Mi Pueblo. Not the latest Helen Mirren film at Boulevard Cinemas, nor a Phil Lesh concert at McNear’s. Not even lunch or dinner at Al’s or Sue’s (actually, visiting the homes of friends I just did figure out).
Yes, sheltering in place for seven years.
The reason? In 2010, I got seriously slammed upside the head: not the suddenness of a car accident, but a slow-burn brain injury from chronic carbon monoxide poisoning. For weeks, the exhaust fumes from the home’s gas heater were spewing toward our nearby hot tub – the tub that only I was using. One brain misfortune morphed into another: by 2012, I developed severe electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), which took me a year to self-diagnose (no, I hadn’t heard of it either; and I’m a doctor.) Now, seven years later, I still can be “zapped” – usually by a rogue cellphone – but this happens less often, and the reaction caused is less severe. But when it does happen, a mind-dimming fog will roll in over hours, not to recede until the next day.
Tens of thousands of dollars later, my home has become an electromagnetic sanctuary. Within its four walls, levels of both regular electric fields and high frequency radio-waves are a tiny fraction of those found in most other homes. But to make this strange life of mine work – to avoid being poisoned by yet another cellphone – I have to live as a recluse. And when I do go out, I must hide inside a weird head-covering made of silver mesh and aluminum screening – not nearly as dashing as some of the masks you see around town these days.
Yes, sheltering in place—I know it oh so well. As a friend of mine said recently: “Now, everyone’s having to Pull a Scott”. Indeed. Welcome to my world.
In spite of this electro-malady, I continue to have a rich work-life: I’m a writer, a hospice physician, a wilderness guide, and a life transitions counselor. I do most of this from home, except obviously the wilderness work. This is all made possible, oddly enough, because of the great electromagnetic miracle of artificial connectivity: phones, emails, internet sites and, increasingly, videoconferences. With so many others now sheltering, too, my connections with the outside world suddenly exploded, as the world began asking more of me than it had in nearly a decade. All of these connections have granted me the blessing of hearing many private stories (and internet ones, too): stories about how other people are coping – or, in some cases, crumbling.
I’d like to offer eight lessons I’ve learned. Some of this is drawn from seven years of solo sheltering, and some comes from this time of collective hunkering down. I draw upon all of me: of course, the writer; but also, the electro-sufferer; the hospice doc; the wilderness guide; and the life transitions counselor. It is with the last that I start.
Lesson 1:
The entire world is now in a liminal space:
the middle phase of a collective rite of passage.
In 1908, the Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep gave us both the term rite of passage and the tripartite map for any great life transition. In his native language, the three phases of a rite of passage are séparation (separation), marge (transition), and agrégation (incorporation).
Or put another way: dying, in-between, and rebirth.
In a matter of months, COVID-19 has killed hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, while also destroying much of the collective story we all had been living out – however true or false, good or bad, that story may have been. What will come next is a great mystery. Will the rebirth that’s coming be an inspiring resurrection or the worst kind of dystopia? Likely some of both.
Even just the next few months are uncertain. Will this lockdown ever fully end? What freedoms will be reinstated next, and when? Who gets to go back to work? When, if ever, do I return to a “normal life”? And a most unusual one: Until we have a vaccine, will society be divided between the already immune and those still vulnerable?
Old life: dead and gone.
New life: not here yet.
Now: caught in The Great In-Between.
Martin Shaw, a mythologist and storyteller, was asked if this time is an initiation. “Initiations are not general, but rather specific,” he answered. “. . . I think of every house in lockdown as an alchemical hut. Millions of them. This enforced solitude is going to produce many different responses. Some will want to get back to life as it used to be, some will make life-changing decisions, and on it goes. But no one, whatever may be claimed, can know what that is yet. Because it’s going to unfold in the secretive chamber of your heart, not as a generalization.”
That's right: no one can know what's to come. Of course not. Any existentialist will tell you: "The future is always uncertain." Any Buddhist might add: "All is impermanent." And yet, to have life so severely disrupted, globally and interpersonally? For many, that has been ominously unsettling.
How to cope?
What’s being asked of us is tremendous fluidity, adaptability, flexibility. In a Great In-Between such as this, each person is moving back and forth, up and down, in and out of each phase of a rite of passage. How to show up in the moment, and do the work that is immediately before you?
The pain of dying: Can I open to what I’ve lost or I’m losing? Am I able to grieve deeply? Can I learn to let go?
The uncertainty of in-between: Can I sit as “no name” with “no story” and hold this great uneasiness?
The challenge of rebirth: Can I face my fears of the future, while also opening to promise and possibility?
In this essay, we’re only at Lesson 1 – one of eight. Let’s just start with what we’ve lost – what’s dying and needs to be grieved and then released.
So many people already have lost so much:
A job.
Food reliably on the table.
A home.
Fundamental assumptions about our world.
The freedom to hug and kiss, to be hugged and kissed.
A friend or family member, now dead.
And for over 100,000 Americans: They have lost their own lives.
So many dead or dying. So much lost and gone. So much letting go to be done.
How about you in your own life? What have you lost? What are you grieving?
Lesson 2:
Fear can be either an adversary or an ally.
Lesson 2:
Fear can be either an adversary or an ally.
This liminal time is so very strange because it’s a global in-between, not just an individual one. We are all swimming together in this great ocean of anxiety. Making this even more challenging is this: the great threat we face, COVID-19, can’t be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched. Unlike a hurricane or an earthquake, this virus is a mere concept in the mind, an idea on the internet, a trigger for an old trauma ...
Until you, or someone you love, gets sick.
I’ve heard or read over a hundred stories now. Phone, Zoom, email, internet. One-on-one, in meetings, in councils. In most of the oral stories I’ve heard, each person seems to have their own individual fear monster that has surfaced, rising out of this collective ocean of anxiety. Some tell a fear story that’s very present tense. For me, it’s been the great worry that my 90-year-old mother – recently hospitalized twice – might die soon, be it from the coronavirus or some other infection. At my hospice, it’s the real fear of nurses and hospice aides that their personal protective equipment will not actually protect them or their families. But most often, what I’ve been hearing are the anxiety stories of people who are worried, but reasonably well. Their stories are often not pandemic-specific, but rather they speak of old personal fears made all the more unmanageable because they, like the rest of us, are treading water in this great ocean.
People fearing loss of the basics: a job, an income, a home.
Older folks fearing the onset of aging, loss of vitality, death.
People living alone fearing isolation, disconnection, loneliness.
Or the opposite: those stuck for too long a time in too small a house – with small children, a difficult spouse, or other challenging housemates – fearing for their sanity, if not their safety.
Each of these fears, and others besides, are not being writ large as a pandemic story, but rather they are being lived out on a much smaller scale. One human at a time. One alchemical hut at a time. Many of the stories being told are attempts to answer a near-universal question: How will I make it through?
Or for some: Will I even make it through?
I have long believed that to leave any fear unnamed and unexplored would invite that fear to become my master. Never did I learn that better than when I first developed EHS. Almost overnight, much of the world (at least inside of towns and cities) felt completely unsafe. Even worse, the threat, like COVID-19, was invisible. That made the fear all the more palpable and, at times, overwhelming. But after I got my first radio-wave meter, I came to realize: Yes, the world is unsafe and yet now the threat can be measured and mitigated. Fear was helping me see how safety might still be possible. I started a diary – actually more like a scientific journal – in which I would document everyday what I was doing, measuring, feeling, learning. Slowly I learned how to be safe in the world, and all that was made possible by fear. In time, fear was no longer an adversary; it had become an ally. And so I changed its name. I now call it “mindfulness”.
Something like this is happening now for all of us. Slowly we are learning what is COVID-safe and what is not. Very safe: staying indoors alone hunkered down; or going outdoors to walk, run or bike alone. Pretty safe: small meetings outside with distancing and masks. Not so safe: indoor gatherings with people who are not housemates. Less safe: close-up care, like a haircut or a dental visit. Very unsafe: large public gatherings.
Fear alone feeds overreaction and anxiety – even panic. But knowledge, gradually accrued, can help turn fear into an ally. Knowledge and fear, coming together, can serve to make a person (reasonably) safe and to get on with life in a (reasonably) good way.
How about you? What’s your own greatest fear?
What is it teaching you? How might it become your ally?
Lesson 3:
A desire for distraction and self-soothing, like fear,
can be either an adversary or an ally.
Many years ago, my mother gave me a stack of jigsaw puzzles. I accepted them, if reluctantly, thinking that maybe, just maybe, they would be a good way to engage my mind, albeit mindlessly. I imagined they might provide a much-needed respite from a work-life that often was way too intense. I placed the puzzles on a shelf in a closet and . . . there they sat for years, unused and untouched.
Around week two of the lockdown, I pulled out those puzzles and within a week or two I was nearing completion of my third one: a Charles Wysocki painting of a bucolic village life coming alive during springtime. Anything, I had reasoned, to distract myself from the near-total coronafication of my life: this constant obsession I had developed of searching on-line for the latest reports, stories, essays, and epidemiological predictions. Slowly I was weaned myself off of one obsession, while ramping up another. Instead of pandemic pieces, I was searching out puzzle pieces. This new fixation was benign enough, but midway through that third puzzle – I began to realize just how addictive this new kind of puzzling had become.
Where is the other half of the mailman’s face? Got it. Now where’s his left leg?
Again, truly benign and a welcome break from the computer. Still, I began to see just how easily I could become addicted. During a time of being in-between – a time of both collective uncertainty and profound personal unease – becoming obsessive is ever so easy. Great uncertainty, it seems, is the devil’s playground. It encourages both obsessive thinking and compulsive action. Makes me wonder what my life would look like (what other lives now look like) if my go-to addictions were different.
TV. Food. Alcohol. Marijuana. Porn. Gambling. Anger. Violence. Whatever.
I borrow here a single sentence from “The Coronation”, a long, thoughtful piece about the pandemic by Charles Eisenstein. “To interrupt a habit is to make it visible,” he writes, “it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice.” After reading this, I finished that third puzzle, boxed it up, and put them all back on the closet shelf. More importantly, I began limiting my daily corona obsession to the New York Times and the Rachel Maddow Show, adding in a carefully selected article or two each week.
I want to stay informed. I don’t want to be obsessed.
And you? In face of so much uncertainty, what habits or addictions are blossoming?
Lesson 4:
The Grim Reaper is everywhere,
as are the Angels of Mercy & Kindness.
Death is everywhere. The morning paper, the internet, television. Homes, hospitals, facilities, factories, prisons. In every state, and in most every county.
I start the day with the local Press Democrat and read about the county case rates, the death count, and the latest loosening of the lockdown. Next, I’m on-line checking out national and global reports, with their ever-shifting search for the latest hot spots and the direst predictions. Then I finish most days on T.V.: Rachel Maddow taking me first to Italy, then New York City, then to small towns in the Midwest. We go inside an ICU ventilators beeping, then blaring; nurses and doctors roaming the bedsides, dressed as if for a sci-fi movie. Or she takes us outside of a nursing home – locked up tight, no visitors allowed –with over half the people inside infected and a quarter already dead. Or much the same outside a prison filled with infected inmates, with family and friends demonstrating on behalf of loved ones. Or there’s that picture of a refrigerator truck outside a morgue being loaded with body bags: a surplus of death that can’t be processed fast enough.
The Grim Reaper is awfully busy. Or is it: He’s busy being awful?
Death is everywhere, and so too is misery. We have three crises hitting us all at once. The medical: a pandemic killing countless. The economic: businesses closing, markets collapsing, unemployment at record levels. The personal: the homeless and the hungry; the addicted and the alcoholic; the isolated and the lonely; the depressed and the suicidal; the angry and the abused. And now with the killing of George Floyd: the murdered and the enraged.
Yes, death and misery everywhere.
But let’s get real here. This suffering is not being spooned out in equal portions. Long-standing vulnerabilities – due to inequities caused by age, disability, class, race, gender, and sexual orientation – have been made all the worse as a virus goes viral, economies crumble, and individual humans are made to suffer.
In California – with all its early success at flattening the curve – People of Color are much more likely to get infected by COVID than white people. In my own Sonoma County, Latinos are 27% of the population and yet they represent 75% of all those infected and 95% of all children infected. This is in part because they are disproportionately represented in “essential sectors”. Put another way: It’s much harder to not go to work when money is tight – whatever the risk of getting infected, and whatever the risk of infecting others if you’re already infected and now getting sick. But it goes deeper than that, much deeper. Longstanding oppression and institutional racism have led to major inequities in accessing many things privileged people (mostly White) take for granted: education, health care, jobs, businesses opportunities, housing, and fair treatment by police and the criminal justice system. That oppression and these inequities have created the very conditions that have the Latinos where I live hit so very hard by the pandemic.
The COVID story is much the same in urban centers across the country, where African Americans are dying of this infection at double or triple the rate of other folks. The issue here is not just about poverty or who has “an essential job”. Due to these longstanding oppression, and the economic and health care inequities that have resulted, African Americans are more likely to suffer from chronic diseases – e.g. obesity, heart disease and lung disease – which increase the risk of a person dying once infected. A double whammy for African Americans: more likely to get infected; more likely to die if infected.
Just as horrific is what’s happening in the Navajo nation. If they were considered a state, they would have the highest rate of infection of any state in the country. Poor communication and access to information. Many without running water and/or electricity. Multiple generations living under one roof. A high incidence of chronic diseases. Again, major vulnerabilities, caused by longstanding institutional racism and inequities, are being further accentuated by the pandemic, thus leading to one of the worst COVID hotspots in the country.
Even in the red states of America, the greatest risk of being infected or dying is in the working class – specifically, those crammed together in tightly packed work settings: most notably (though not only) meat-packing plants that have been mandated by the federal government to remain open. Many of these workers are being offered up as sacrificial lambs, so the rest of America can still have meat on the dinner table.
For me, the one that hits closest to home are the elderly. My own mother is able to stay at home and stay safe, but what about all the other mothers and grandmothers (fathers and grandfathers, too) who are warehoused in nursing facilities?
Yes, death and misery are everywhere.
But so, too, is a collective call to be kinder, to be more of service, to come together as a community. This is what the reality of our own mortality can do – well, for some anyway. This calls to mind Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell. Solnit starts with the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, wends her way through multiple other disasters, and ends at Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Along the way she weaves together many stories about how the paradise of human resilience, hope and solidarity can emerge out of the hell of a natural disaster.
In my own hometown: People are delivering to the local hospital an array of gifts –delicious meals, home-baked treats, flowers, wine, handwritten notes, children’s artwork, and perhaps most important, unused PPE and home-sewn masks.
In New York City (and other cities and towns around the world): Every night at an appointed time, people open their windows, or step outside onto balconies or rooftops, and come together as one big sound – clapping, screaming, singing, making noise – all to say thank you to their hospital staff and first-responders working at the front-line of the epidemic.
Or more simply, all over America: Strangers outside walk down a public street, pass each other from a distance and wave hello (in my own hometown, sad to say, greeting a stranger on the street would seldom happen during pre-COVID times).
But here’s my favorite example, again close to home: Driving down a suburban street, I come across a series of handmade signs posted about fifty feet apart, each with a big red heart and inside each heart a single word in black. Reading them one after another, the signs say: “All . . . In . . . This . . . Together.” By the last sign, I am smiling, imagining this to be the masterwork of some 12-year-old child, stuck at home, making something good out of something so very bad.
Paradise built in hell.
Even if the lockdown ends soon, dancing with the pandemic will likely go on for a very long time – perhaps not ending until we have an effective vaccine. Until then, we will need to sustain something of this community spirit, so that most of us can make it through – including those who are especially vulnerable. The elderly. The chronically ill. The urban and suburban poor. Factory workers. Prison inmates. The Navajo nation. And on and on. The most vulnerable now, will likely be even more vulnerable months from now. The safety net of society – already with great rips in it – is now being shredded in places. In the face of that, this community spirit will be needed for a long time to come. We need to keep it alive and extend it to others.
I’m reminded of a Martin Buber quotation from long ago: “A society may be termed human in the measure to which its members confirm one another.”
Or borrowing from the wisdom of one 12-year-old and her series of heart-shaped signs: “All. In. This. Together.”
So how about you? How do you define “All”?
And what does “Together” mean to you?
I start the day with the local Press Democrat and read about the county case rates, the death count, and the latest loosening of the lockdown. Next, I’m on-line checking out national and global reports, with their ever-shifting search for the latest hot spots and the direst predictions. Then I finish most days on T.V.: Rachel Maddow taking me first to Italy, then New York City, then to small towns in the Midwest. We go inside an ICU ventilators beeping, then blaring; nurses and doctors roaming the bedsides, dressed as if for a sci-fi movie. Or she takes us outside of a nursing home – locked up tight, no visitors allowed –with over half the people inside infected and a quarter already dead. Or much the same outside a prison filled with infected inmates, with family and friends demonstrating on behalf of loved ones. Or there’s that picture of a refrigerator truck outside a morgue being loaded with body bags: a surplus of death that can’t be processed fast enough.
The Grim Reaper is awfully busy. Or is it: He’s busy being awful?
Death is everywhere, and so too is misery. We have three crises hitting us all at once. The medical: a pandemic killing countless. The economic: businesses closing, markets collapsing, unemployment at record levels. The personal: the homeless and the hungry; the addicted and the alcoholic; the isolated and the lonely; the depressed and the suicidal; the angry and the abused. And now with the killing of George Floyd: the murdered and the enraged.
Yes, death and misery everywhere.
But let’s get real here. This suffering is not being spooned out in equal portions. Long-standing vulnerabilities – due to inequities caused by age, disability, class, race, gender, and sexual orientation – have been made all the worse as a virus goes viral, economies crumble, and individual humans are made to suffer.
In California – with all its early success at flattening the curve – People of Color are much more likely to get infected by COVID than white people. In my own Sonoma County, Latinos are 27% of the population and yet they represent 75% of all those infected and 95% of all children infected. This is in part because they are disproportionately represented in “essential sectors”. Put another way: It’s much harder to not go to work when money is tight – whatever the risk of getting infected, and whatever the risk of infecting others if you’re already infected and now getting sick. But it goes deeper than that, much deeper. Longstanding oppression and institutional racism have led to major inequities in accessing many things privileged people (mostly White) take for granted: education, health care, jobs, businesses opportunities, housing, and fair treatment by police and the criminal justice system. That oppression and these inequities have created the very conditions that have the Latinos where I live hit so very hard by the pandemic.
The COVID story is much the same in urban centers across the country, where African Americans are dying of this infection at double or triple the rate of other folks. The issue here is not just about poverty or who has “an essential job”. Due to these longstanding oppression, and the economic and health care inequities that have resulted, African Americans are more likely to suffer from chronic diseases – e.g. obesity, heart disease and lung disease – which increase the risk of a person dying once infected. A double whammy for African Americans: more likely to get infected; more likely to die if infected.
Just as horrific is what’s happening in the Navajo nation. If they were considered a state, they would have the highest rate of infection of any state in the country. Poor communication and access to information. Many without running water and/or electricity. Multiple generations living under one roof. A high incidence of chronic diseases. Again, major vulnerabilities, caused by longstanding institutional racism and inequities, are being further accentuated by the pandemic, thus leading to one of the worst COVID hotspots in the country.
Even in the red states of America, the greatest risk of being infected or dying is in the working class – specifically, those crammed together in tightly packed work settings: most notably (though not only) meat-packing plants that have been mandated by the federal government to remain open. Many of these workers are being offered up as sacrificial lambs, so the rest of America can still have meat on the dinner table.
For me, the one that hits closest to home are the elderly. My own mother is able to stay at home and stay safe, but what about all the other mothers and grandmothers (fathers and grandfathers, too) who are warehoused in nursing facilities?
Yes, death and misery are everywhere.
But so, too, is a collective call to be kinder, to be more of service, to come together as a community. This is what the reality of our own mortality can do – well, for some anyway. This calls to mind Rebecca Solnit’s brilliant 2009 book, A Paradise Built in Hell. Solnit starts with the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, wends her way through multiple other disasters, and ends at Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Along the way she weaves together many stories about how the paradise of human resilience, hope and solidarity can emerge out of the hell of a natural disaster.
In my own hometown: People are delivering to the local hospital an array of gifts –delicious meals, home-baked treats, flowers, wine, handwritten notes, children’s artwork, and perhaps most important, unused PPE and home-sewn masks.
In New York City (and other cities and towns around the world): Every night at an appointed time, people open their windows, or step outside onto balconies or rooftops, and come together as one big sound – clapping, screaming, singing, making noise – all to say thank you to their hospital staff and first-responders working at the front-line of the epidemic.
Or more simply, all over America: Strangers outside walk down a public street, pass each other from a distance and wave hello (in my own hometown, sad to say, greeting a stranger on the street would seldom happen during pre-COVID times).
But here’s my favorite example, again close to home: Driving down a suburban street, I come across a series of handmade signs posted about fifty feet apart, each with a big red heart and inside each heart a single word in black. Reading them one after another, the signs say: “All . . . In . . . This . . . Together.” By the last sign, I am smiling, imagining this to be the masterwork of some 12-year-old child, stuck at home, making something good out of something so very bad.
Paradise built in hell.
Even if the lockdown ends soon, dancing with the pandemic will likely go on for a very long time – perhaps not ending until we have an effective vaccine. Until then, we will need to sustain something of this community spirit, so that most of us can make it through – including those who are especially vulnerable. The elderly. The chronically ill. The urban and suburban poor. Factory workers. Prison inmates. The Navajo nation. And on and on. The most vulnerable now, will likely be even more vulnerable months from now. The safety net of society – already with great rips in it – is now being shredded in places. In the face of that, this community spirit will be needed for a long time to come. We need to keep it alive and extend it to others.
I’m reminded of a Martin Buber quotation from long ago: “A society may be termed human in the measure to which its members confirm one another.”
Or borrowing from the wisdom of one 12-year-old and her series of heart-shaped signs: “All. In. This. Together.”
So how about you? How do you define “All”?
And what does “Together” mean to you?
Lesson 5:
To survive sheltering in place,
best to find a way to shelter in nature.
In mid-March, during the first weekend after California’s shelter-in-place order began, Sonoma County was blessed with unseasonably hot weather. Throngs of people flocked to the ocean, packing the parking lots with cars and then spilling out across the beaches. From the bluffs above, public health officials surveyed the scene, aghast. Everywhere, people were mixing and mingling: flouting rules for social distancing, while flaunting their capacity for social intimacy. On Monday, the next day, the gavel of a new public health decree came crashing down. As of Tuesday, all beaches, parks and open spaces would be closed. Walking would only be allowed on paved roads.
I was devastated.
I can tell you firsthand, the only way to remain reasonably sane while sheltering in place – for seven weeks, seven months, or seven years – is to get outdoors. Every day. For seven years, I have been compelled to go outside each day, for a half-hour or more. I must have the chance to walk under an open sky – whether it be blue or black, crystal clear or dripping wet. I need to be surrounded by a spaciousness outside of me that mirrors back a spaciousness inside – a feeling that I seldom experience indoors.
Call that feeling “freedom”.
After two days of mourning the loss of trails and beaches, my solution was to drive 5-10 minutes outside of town and go walking down a country road with my two Australian cattle dog mutts, Oliver and Chloe, tugging on their leads. Not real wilderness. Not even bucolic Charles Wysocki. But at least there was an open sky overhead, and countless new smells for the dogs. Each afternoon, after five or six hours of my corona-obsessing on the internet, the three of us would go outside and feel a little less trapped, a little more free.
Early during the fourth week of the lockdown, I had the impulse to flip the script. The dogs and I went for our walk just after sunrise, leaving my internet and puzzle obsessions for later. We drove to a favorite country road that winds through Chileno Valley and started walking. Imagine large green hills in the distance framing a big blue sky and vast dewy pastures, with sunlight streaming through misty air. In your mind’s eye, also include Chloe’s favorite feature: the herds of black-and-white cattle that had her in a total obsessive mode of her own. The three of us were happy. Not just during the walk, but for the rest of the day. Happy. Happy. Happy.
“That,” I told several friends, “was the smartest thing I’ve done this entire month.” I was relearning old lessons. In order to survive sheltering at home, I have to make time to shelter in nature. And the best time – for me, anyway – is early morning.
And you? Where is that you go walking outside?
What does that special freedom mean to you?
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Lesson 6: After “The Hammer” comes “The Dance”. |
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he radical step of a social lockdown Tomas Pueyo has dubbed “The Hammer”. Once we survived that drastic measure, what has come next is “The Dance”. Lots of attention now is directed toward what the collective dance shall look like: no large gatherings, widespread testing, isolating the infected, contact tracing, and then more testing. As it should be. We need to figure this out – though some states and countries are doing a better job than others.
What’s getting much less attention is the individual dance we each will be learning. Who and where and what is safe? Can I go into this building, and for how long? When and where do I need to wear a mask? When is it okay to give a hug or a handshake? Do I just wave, or bow, or blow a kiss? Or is it time for a chicken-wing elbow bump?
The Maypole about which we all are dancing is this central question: Who is in “my bubble” – my own family unit? These are the people who you are willing to accept that, if one of them gets infected, you will likely get infected, too. Some people who live alone have chosen to be a bubble of one. Other people include just their families: those in their homes and perhaps close relatives that they visit. Still others make the bubble as large as possible, saying: “to hell with precautions – if I get infected, I get infected.”
For me? My partner and I have chosen to have a bubble of four: ourselves and our two dogs. When doing the essentials outside the house – shopping and errands – it’s all about masking and distancing, wiping and cleaning, handwashing and more handwashing.
Meeting people outside that bubble is where this gets difficult. How do you negotiate with other people what will be an acceptable level of shared risk? Evelin Dacker, a physician and sexual health activist, offers a guide to this social dance called “COVID CARE: A Way Forward to Opening Up Social Circles.” She names (and defines) six levels of risk. 0: Very Strict. 1: Strict. 2: Fairly Strict. 3. Somewhat Open. 4. Moderately Open. 5. Very Open.
These six levels raise the question: What will happen if two or more people entering a social dance are living at different levels of risk-taking? Difficult negotiations are inevitable. What makes this all so much harder is that wearing a mask does not protect mask-wearers nearly as much as it does those that they encounter. And yet, those most likely to be infected – any one acting at level 3, 4, or 5 – are the people who most need to wear a mask for greater public safety, and the people most likely to refuse to do so.
What if some of the dance partners coming together are not conscious about these differences, or are unable to negotiate openly and respectfully? Well then, “badness” is likely to happen. Recoiling. Lashing out. Judgment. Shaming. Secret risk-taking. Revulsion. Badness.
Imagine instead if there is an open expression of needs and wishes without harsh judgment or shaming. Then perhaps “goodness” will happen. Understanding. Compassion. Reaching a shared consensus. Community building. Goodness.
For someone old, married, and boring like me, all this social dancing seems doable. But what about the person who is not so old, not so married, or not so boring? What if a person who wants to be sexually active in these times?
The latest data suggests that if a fit and healthy person gets COVID-infected, the chance of dying is around 1%. For people whose loins are making decisions as much as their minds, those odds may not sound so bad. Perhaps some will say “To hell with it – I’ll just get infected.” That’s a prime example of Dacker’s level 5: “Very Open”. Important then to consider this: Any high risk that person decides is acceptable also gets translated into greater risk for any housemates, co-workers, or other contacts. Does that person self-quarantine for two weeks after each new sexual encounter? Not likely. Does that person avoid visiting a 90-year-old mother or grandmother for those two weeks? Perhaps. But for months on end? What’s a sexually active person supposed to do?
(Here’s an interesting suggestion from the Netherlands government to its people. Get yourself a seksbuddy: one consistent sexual partner for the duration of the pandemic.)
The challenge of negotiating risk is something we all must figure out whether we’re sexually active or not. Playing important roles in this collective social dance are guilt, remorse, and shame. What I know about these difficult emotions comes from my early years of having EHS: a time when I experienced dreadful shame. Chronically sick. Less able to work. Having to self-isolate. And worst of all, wearing strange self-protective headgear if I did go out. While it was relatively easy to turn fear into an ally, transforming shame was much more difficult. The shame I felt was often dreadful – sometimes even crippling.
A psychiatrist-friend helped me to disentangle this mess. First, she said about guilt how socially important it is. It helps people behave responsibly. A person often will feel guilty before doing something that might harm another or feel remorse after doing it. So yes, if you are considering doing something that might get another person COVID-infected, let in the guilt before you act (or at least, feel the remorse afterward, so you don’t do it again). As a Buddhist teacher once told me: “Take the time to feel the burn of it.” If you do, you’ll be turning guilt into an ally. Let’s rename that “social responsibility”.
But what about shame? “Shame”, I wrote long ago, “is a dark tangle of vanity, self-blame, embarrassment, and self-criticism.” Why is it important to name that today? Imagine months from now: You are in a social situation where pressure is being applied to do something you still consider unsafe – anything from taking off a mask, to shaking hands, or all the way to a one-night stand. I encourage you not to allow shame to prevent you from staying safe – however YOU choose to define safety. Don’t allow others (our yourself) to shame you into doing something that you would rather not do.
Years ago, I had to choose safety over the vanity of not wearing strange headgear in public. How was that even possible? As my psychiatrist-friend taught me, I needed to transform shame into humility. “Humility”, I wrote back then, “is a blend of understanding, self-compassion, self-respect and dignity—bowing down to something bigger, beyond one’s control.” If fear can become “mindfulness” and guilt can become “social responsibility”, perhaps shame can become an ally, too. Let’s call it “humility”. If someone tries to shame you into being unsafe, say to yourself: Just lil’ ol’ me here, trying to stay safe. In my own way, not theirs.
Okay, maybe staying safe will take more than just humility. Maybe some health self-assertion will also be needed. “Please, don’t you do that.” Or, “No, I won’t do that.” Whatever you say or do, though, try not to let shaming – by self or others – dictate what you do.
Be safe, whatever “safe” means for you.
So what’s this dance like for you?
How do you handle guilt, remorse, and social responsibility?
Or shame and humility?
Consider these important steps in the new dance we all are just beginning to learn.
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Lesson 7: "Social distancing” splits into “social intimacy” and “physical distancing”. |
In the last month, I have spent more time on video calls or in video-conferences than I had in the previous 63 years. Most of that: all to the good. As above, I’ve gotten to hear so many stories about how people are coping (or crumbling). That has offered me a much wider view of the lockdown, allowing me to better understand my own experience. Also, in one-on-one sessions or group councils, I’ve been able to hold up a reasonably clean “mirror” for some, helping them to better see their own situation. And in more traditional business meetings, I’ve been a part of groups able to do good work: discussions and decisions; policies and procedures.
But don’t be fooled. Being on Zoom is not the same as being in the same room.
This became much clearer when I read a quotation from Gianpiero Petriglieri sent to me by a friend – someone else on a Corona Response Committee (CRC) that I’ve been attending every week. “I spoke to an old therapist friend today, and finally understood why everyone’s so exhausted after video calls. It’s the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds tricked into the idea of being together when our bodies feel we’re not. Dissonance is exhausting.” That weekly CRC group has decided to do all its sessions by phone, not by video. We get to focus merely on the words spoken and the work that needs to be done, rather than being distracted by a Zoom crossfire between connection and disconnection.
I read one person’s prediction that in the months and years ahead, more and more people will be working from home. It seems inevitable. Going forward video calls will be a huge part of our shared lives. After years of sheltering, I trust that much of that will be wonderful. But not all of it. It’s taken me seven years to learn how to balance the solitude of staying at home – which I DO love – with the equally important need to be connected with others. For months to come, if not years, we each will have to find our own balance. How do you slowly replace the current extreme of social distancing with a personal balance of physical distancing and social intimacy? The two are not mutually incompatible. I can name the very day when I learned this.
On a beautiful spring morning in early April, I drove the 90-minutes to my parents’ home to deliver frozen home-cooked meals, a few books, and bag of rubber gloves. My partner and I then sat outside with my mother and stepfather – ten feet apart with masks on – and visited for an hour and a half: the limit of my mother’s energy. Instead of the distance of a phone call or the dissonance of Zoom, we got to experience the resonance of real presence. After what my mother and our family had been through, this was for me the most important event of the entire lockdown. Physical distancing and social intimacy – both.
(True confession. Brace yourself. At the end of a second visit, ten days later, my mother insisted on giving me a hug just before I left.)
Physical distancing & social intimacy – how do you do this social dance?
But don’t be fooled. Being on Zoom is not the same as being in the same room.
This became much clearer when I read a quotation from Gianpiero Petriglieri sent to me by a friend – someone else on a Corona Response Committee (CRC) that I’ve been attending every week. “I spoke to an old therapist friend today, and finally understood why everyone’s so exhausted after video calls. It’s the plausible deniability of each other’s absence. Our minds tricked into the idea of being together when our bodies feel we’re not. Dissonance is exhausting.” That weekly CRC group has decided to do all its sessions by phone, not by video. We get to focus merely on the words spoken and the work that needs to be done, rather than being distracted by a Zoom crossfire between connection and disconnection.
I read one person’s prediction that in the months and years ahead, more and more people will be working from home. It seems inevitable. Going forward video calls will be a huge part of our shared lives. After years of sheltering, I trust that much of that will be wonderful. But not all of it. It’s taken me seven years to learn how to balance the solitude of staying at home – which I DO love – with the equally important need to be connected with others. For months to come, if not years, we each will have to find our own balance. How do you slowly replace the current extreme of social distancing with a personal balance of physical distancing and social intimacy? The two are not mutually incompatible. I can name the very day when I learned this.
On a beautiful spring morning in early April, I drove the 90-minutes to my parents’ home to deliver frozen home-cooked meals, a few books, and bag of rubber gloves. My partner and I then sat outside with my mother and stepfather – ten feet apart with masks on – and visited for an hour and a half: the limit of my mother’s energy. Instead of the distance of a phone call or the dissonance of Zoom, we got to experience the resonance of real presence. After what my mother and our family had been through, this was for me the most important event of the entire lockdown. Physical distancing and social intimacy – both.
(True confession. Brace yourself. At the end of a second visit, ten days later, my mother insisted on giving me a hug just before I left.)
Physical distancing & social intimacy – how do you do this social dance?
Lesson 8:
A rebirth is happening – what do you want to call in?
The Great Mall of America, after months of being closed and shuttered, is now reopening. State by state, county by county, the shelter-in-place orders are slowly being relaxed. Common freedoms – once taken for granted and then taken away – are slowly being reinstated. A collective rebirth is underway.
By some accounts, we’re headed toward a brave new world: a great depression, perhaps worst. What interests me here, though, is not what this will look like on a large scale – as important as that will be. Rather, I’m curious about what’s happening inside the secretive chamber of each person’s heart. In Lesson 2 above, I underscored how much uncertainty and fear are to be found in the Great Unknown of the In-Between. But a threshold time like this is also a Great Opportunity.
What will your own personal rebirth look like? What new way of living are you calling in?
Perhaps my favorite COVID article, found during all those hours of scouring the internet, was Julio Vincent Gambuto's “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting.” The term gaslighting comes from a 1938 stage play, which soon after became the movie, “Gaslight”. In the film version, Ingrid Bergman plays a woman whose husband is trying to convince her that she’s going insane by manipulating small elements of their shared environment and then insisting she’s mistaken or misremembering. One of his maneuvers is slowly turning down the gas lights in their house while denying that anything has changed. The term gaslighting has since come to mean manipulating someone into doubting their own sanity. And so, according to Gambuto, what’s coming our way is the ultimate gaslighting. “Pretty soon,” he writes, “as the country begins to figure out how we ‘open back up’ and move forward, very powerful forces will try to convince us all to get back to normal. (That never happened. What are you talking about?) Billions of dollars will be spent on advertising, messaging, and television and media content to make you feel comfortable again.”
How about you? In the face of this corporate onslaught, will you be able to trust what is being revealed inside your own heart?
I implore you. Call upon your common sense. Your critical thinking. Your capacity to source, from inside, what is true for you. Call upon your many allies. Mindfulness and conscious choosing. Community responsibility and humility. Safe distancing and social intimacy. And get yourself outside – whenever you can. Rather than being bombarded by the dirty and distorted perspective of the media blitz that’s coming, allow the natural world to offer you a clean and clear mirror.
Remember this: Your own personal rebirth belongs to you, not to Corporate America.
A rebirth, like any birth, never comes in an instant. Consider this word not to be a noun, rebirth, but rather a verb, rebirthing. Let the rebirthing happen in its own time, in its own way. Imagine yourself to be a pupa inside a cocoon, or a chick inside an egg pecking at the shell. Your own rebirthing is already underway.
So I ask again:
What new way of living are you calling in?
Evelin Dacker. COVID CARE: A Way Forward to Opening Up Social Circles. May 7, 2020. https://medium.com/@evelindacker/covid-care-e2ede67428d4
Scott Eberle. An Underworld Journey: Learning to Cope with Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity. June 1, 2017. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/eco.2016.0036
Charles Eisenstein. The Coronation. March 2020. https://charleseisenstein.org
Julio Vincent Gambuto. Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting: You are not crazy, my friends. April 10, 2020. https://forge.medium.com/
Tomas Pueyo. Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance: What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time. March 19, 2020. https://medium.com
Martin Shaw. Is This an Initiation? An Urgent Invitation to Beautiful Learning. April 2020. https://emergencemagazine.org/
By some accounts, we’re headed toward a brave new world: a great depression, perhaps worst. What interests me here, though, is not what this will look like on a large scale – as important as that will be. Rather, I’m curious about what’s happening inside the secretive chamber of each person’s heart. In Lesson 2 above, I underscored how much uncertainty and fear are to be found in the Great Unknown of the In-Between. But a threshold time like this is also a Great Opportunity.
What will your own personal rebirth look like? What new way of living are you calling in?
Perhaps my favorite COVID article, found during all those hours of scouring the internet, was Julio Vincent Gambuto's “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting.” The term gaslighting comes from a 1938 stage play, which soon after became the movie, “Gaslight”. In the film version, Ingrid Bergman plays a woman whose husband is trying to convince her that she’s going insane by manipulating small elements of their shared environment and then insisting she’s mistaken or misremembering. One of his maneuvers is slowly turning down the gas lights in their house while denying that anything has changed. The term gaslighting has since come to mean manipulating someone into doubting their own sanity. And so, according to Gambuto, what’s coming our way is the ultimate gaslighting. “Pretty soon,” he writes, “as the country begins to figure out how we ‘open back up’ and move forward, very powerful forces will try to convince us all to get back to normal. (That never happened. What are you talking about?) Billions of dollars will be spent on advertising, messaging, and television and media content to make you feel comfortable again.”
How about you? In the face of this corporate onslaught, will you be able to trust what is being revealed inside your own heart?
I implore you. Call upon your common sense. Your critical thinking. Your capacity to source, from inside, what is true for you. Call upon your many allies. Mindfulness and conscious choosing. Community responsibility and humility. Safe distancing and social intimacy. And get yourself outside – whenever you can. Rather than being bombarded by the dirty and distorted perspective of the media blitz that’s coming, allow the natural world to offer you a clean and clear mirror.
Remember this: Your own personal rebirth belongs to you, not to Corporate America.
A rebirth, like any birth, never comes in an instant. Consider this word not to be a noun, rebirth, but rather a verb, rebirthing. Let the rebirthing happen in its own time, in its own way. Imagine yourself to be a pupa inside a cocoon, or a chick inside an egg pecking at the shell. Your own rebirthing is already underway.
So I ask again:
What new way of living are you calling in?
Evelin Dacker. COVID CARE: A Way Forward to Opening Up Social Circles. May 7, 2020. https://medium.com/@evelindacker/covid-care-e2ede67428d4
Scott Eberle. An Underworld Journey: Learning to Cope with Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity. June 1, 2017. https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/eco.2016.0036
Charles Eisenstein. The Coronation. March 2020. https://charleseisenstein.org
Julio Vincent Gambuto. Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting: You are not crazy, my friends. April 10, 2020. https://forge.medium.com/
Tomas Pueyo. Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance: What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time. March 19, 2020. https://medium.com
Martin Shaw. Is This an Initiation? An Urgent Invitation to Beautiful Learning. April 2020. https://emergencemagazine.org/