You are Smart, Beautiful, Brave and Strong!

I drive a Prius, which makes it only marginally better. 

I drive through the back roads of Virginia, ushered along by the Maryland artery of 340 that crosses two bridges over our two rivers, the Shenandoah and the Potomac. I do not often think “you never cross the same river twice” while I’m driving, but it’s true. The commute is hard and absolutely grinding, but it has indeed become a meditation of its own, a practice of gratitude for the weather and the land and the birds and the whole damn planet by extension. There are still barren scraps that look miserable — in Lovettsville, there’s the gun store whose owner puts out a fresh new venomous sign about Joe Biden every other week. There are the new housing developments that crop up almost overnight like an unwelcome mushroom colony — no fairy ring here. 

But what it is, what makes my life worth living, is the parts of the drive that are so incredibly beautiful that I am transported when I see it. No matter how briefly or unconsciously I see them, some neural pathway in my brain plugged right in to the gentle joy center lights up and comes alive. I have seen cormorants, ducks, geese, peregrine falcons, osprey, bald eagles and egrets, and great blue herons on these rivers. Just this morning a long-legged heron flew overhead a hundred yards ahead of me and I watched it, legs dangling but with grace, and thought, this is what it’s all worth.

Prompt phrases: “The World didn’t stop.”  or “I don’t even know what day it is.”

The early days of the pandemic reminded me of that time between Christmas and New Years — adrift in a kind of grey boundary-less sea, shuffling from bedroom to bathroom to living room and back through again in a meandering, meaningless pattern. I had just been diagnosed with chronic Lyme and one of the medicines I was taking made me woozy, almost unable to walk straight, which didn’t help with that unmoored feeling. March struggles to be a pretty time of year anyway, and here I was struggling just to get out of pajamas and brush my teeth. The uncertainty made it easy to imagine that maybe there was no point to brushing my teeth; we were all going to die of a mysterious plague and who cared if I had last night’s pizza stuck between my incisors?

For whatever reason, I’m not constitutionally suited to paralyzing despair, though I find it really tempting. After a length of time — a few days? Two weeks? I wrote myself a cheerfully stern little note from a pad shaped like a potted cactus. “Good Morning!” the note reads. “Everything’s going to be OK!” Followed by the list of hygienic things that absolutely must be done at a bare minimum (most of the time, at least 2 of those things got done), toothbrushing, face washing, tongue scraping, and walking the dog. Then the affirmation: “You are Smart, Beautiful, Brave and Strong!”