"...everything is coming together and unraveling at the same time."

(from an email exchange with a friend, W.D.)

I woke from a dream this morning where I was shopping at Walmart and an enormous grizzly bear came charging in through the doors, running directly toward me. As I opened my eyes, I was thinking, "As if the plague is not enough. Now I have to worry about bears!"

My sister suggested (via text) that the bear was not a sign of me stressing about going to the store, but a symbol of me as the bear. "Go get 'em," she wrote, and I liked that interpretation better than my own.

Reminders I have had to give myself today:

• There is nothing new to feeling anxious about grocery shopping. I've never liked to shop. Except for books. Books are the one exception.
• Going shopping usually wears me out. The fact that I was feeling fatigued post grocery trip does not mean that I was showing signs of any virus. I was just darned happy to have the task of shopping over and done with and I needed a rest.
• I may gasp at the emptiness of the shelves, but let's be honest. This is still a place of abundance. There are people all over the world who would have been shocked to see all the food that was available on the shelves today. And people in my own community for whom all the abundance on the shelves doesn't really matter because they can't afford it.
• Strategizing for the shopping trip was kind of a kick. List making via store layout is my groove! M came along to make things go more quickly. We knocked out lists for two families (us and the Oparents) in only slightly more time than we usually do for one. 

But let me take off my rose colored glasses for a minute (a blessing--thanks, Mom--and a curse). 

Life. Is. Different.

I am scared. And I keep having to remind myself to breath. And to stop gritting my teeth. 

I am heartbroken for my daughter, who had her last days of college classes without even knowing they were her last days. Who won't get to experience the big hoopla of walking across the stage for her college graduation.

I am angry on behalf of all three of my kids, whose plans for the immediate future have been thrown into all kinds of topsy-turvy unknowns. Though they are survivors, and I know none of this is going to break them. It doesn't stop me from mourning for all that will be changed for them.

I am afraid for the people who are close to me who might get sick, those for whom this might hit the hardest.

I ache for the families my husband works with, the calls we've been getting this week, the couples who were already struggling to successfully co-parent, and now have this wrench of (sometimes further) job instability thrown in, and additional worries about the fates of their children when they can not be with them.

And though there's plenty more stored up inside my brain, that's as much as I can allow myself to express right now. Because I have never found much comfort in focusing on my fears and my afraids, my angers and my aches. Drawing attention to them simply makes them too, too big.

And so I say, enough for now, and I look again at all the good I see in the world.

My community is an amazing, special place. And it will surprise me in the levels of amazing and special it reaches. I will continue to contribute to it, to lend my strengths, and try not to to detract too much by my weaknesses.

M's mural continues to grow.