Reawakening

After over a year in physical isolation, I am beginning to emerge. It is a strange transition, I am never quite sure when to wear my mask. As foreign as it still feels, I am reluctant to let it go too quickly. Different rules apply in different places. I went to meet several members of a board I’m involved with in a new location. On the door it gave clear directions, cutting through the confusion.  Vaccinated people do not need to wear masks. We happily took ours off and it was the first time in over a year that I saw their faces unmasked without a screen between us. Momentarily, I felt rather daring, then it quickly felt normal.

I've begun to meet weekly in person with a close friend as I record her story. It is quite a compelling one. She is a survivor of the Holocaust, 97 years old. We met each week by phone during Covid and I typed as she recounted. Pre-Covid, we used to go out to lunch each week, but now I pick up lunch and we meet at her home to work on our project.

Memorial Day weekend we met up with my brother-in-law to visit the graves of family members. While one other vaccinated person felt safe to be with unmasked, when we entered a restaurant, I felt flummoxed by masking etiquette. We wore our masks while we got our food, took them off to eat and then what? Do you put it back on when you finish eating?

 

I’ve ventured into grocery stores, still masked, first for a few items, then for a big shopping trip. Over the past year we’ve had groceries delivered and I keep getting messages from Target that my cart misses me, as if I am so starved for connection that I am anthropomorphizing my grocery cart. I’m still shopping for two week stretches out of habit and I have a new appreciation for those delivery people who sustained us over the past year. I celebrated my new-found freedom by getting my favorite foods at Trader Joes (which doesn't deliver) and noticed the slight weight gain that followed. There was a discipline around planning meals that I need to manage to maintain. The same goes for a daily workout. I anticipate schedules getting busier away from home when it becomes harder to fit that workout in. 

It is a reawakening and as I worked with the theme of brokenness and wholeness in the Artists' Lab, I found the echo of my experience in my artwork. As the ice of winter was thawing, my husband and I encountered an area where the ice had cracked and water flowed beneath it. It too felt as if it was reawakening. I had taken a picture of the ice fragments when my husband suggested I film it to capture the movement. I ended up combining a photo, a video and the painting above titled Reawakening, into a short piece that you will find at the bottom of this post.

 

I feel as if I needed this break and yes, I realize a pandemic is a bit of overkill quite literally to make that happen. Let me assure you, it would not be my chosen method of epiphany. But I know that I am a person who likes to be in the middle of things and unless the world stops along with me, I keep going, like a hungry person at an all you can eat buffet.

 

Now the world didn’t really stop. It just allowed me to structure my time from home. I attended writing workshops and a three week course on the Holocaust, lectures on art from London and book talks from as far away as Poland. I presented at conferences and gave genealogy talks on-line. Virtually, I was able to gather descendants from one of my ancestral towns from around the world. I consulted with genealogy clients locally as well as nationally and internationally. I met a new friend who had moved here, introduced through an old friend, and set up regular on-line visits and I connected with old friends who live elsewhere now that Zoom seemed to make reconnecting so much easier. My artists’ lab continued to meet on-line and actually allowed for more engagement with breakout rooms enabling more small group discussions. Nonprofit meetings continued on-line and I managed presentations of my genealogy group to both a local and national audience. In some ways my life got busier and broader in scope, while my physical sphere shrank. 

 

So which world do I prefer? I’m not sure. I think I’ve forgotten what it feels like to spend physical time with friends without the careful precautions the pandemic has required. Sometimes it just seems easier to Zoom. I can picture myself sharing a meal or a walk with friends, but I don’t think all of the nonprofit meetings have to be in person. I am hoping they conclude the same.

 

Now I realize this has been a harder time for my extroverted friends. They have a much more fundamental need for that physical connection. It has also been harder on friends who live alone. Still, living with someone isn’t always such a panacea. As much as I describe myself as an introvert, I live with someone who is even more so. We both got much more in touch with our need for space, even while valuing our connection. We realized that my prior busy schedule had given us both some breathing room. Now we needed to learn to co-exist in the same shared space, often by carving out our own physical turf. Fortunately we also have a studio that provided some additional room.  Our proximity leant itself to working out together at home or walking and our mutual fascination with the politics of our times led to a constant stream of CNN in our home.

 

So I don’t know what the ideal world would look like, but I hope to emerge thoughtfully and incorporate what I’ve learned through this pause. I will be maintaining some of the discipline that I drew on for diet and exercise while allowing friendships and outings to gradually re-enter my world. And I’ll be holding onto the expansion of my world that technology afforded while preserving windows of unscheduled time for the many interests that feed my soul.

Or click on Pulsation of Life to see it full screen