I began writing this blog one year before the beginning of the end. It was 2004, and I had gone to New Orleans from San Rafael to be near my mother, whose health was spiraling downward. My friend needed a dog and house sitter for the summer, and it proved the perfect respite from my too busy life in the Bay Area. I would walk to the dog park every morning by Cabrini and meet my friends with their dogs. Life moved slower, disconnected, and easier. By May the next year, my husband and I had packed all of our belongings and moved to New Orleans. It was to be my rehoming, but it became the undoing of everything that had preceded it.
The story of what happened next is now etched into a laundry list of losses – evacuate, 2005 Federal Flood, divorce, house terrors, job loss, hair loss, house loss – so many losses that kept stacking up in what felt like the end of days. I had to work my way out of that worm hole and start looking for the blessings (read: start manufacturing the blessings) and so they became so: adoption, my bald became my beautiful, untethered from a 9-5, I took a leap and bought a blues hall, and on and on.
Now, here in 2020, the year I had declared my year to soar, to really expand my vision, here once again I am met with the end of days as COVID-19 has clipped not just mine, but every person on this planet’s wings. And yet, because I have learned that the end of days is a way of being, I am not scared.
At first, I jumped right into imagining where the opportunities are – the Hall as a home schooling hub, video meditations, outdoor movies where the six feet rule could apply to families on blankets. Then I stopped myself because really the one thing I haven’t done during any of these end of days events is stop.
Now the end of days presents an opportunity to stop – I dreamed last night I was self soothing. I said to myself – there is enough. This came from years of living in the end of days. I have been conditioned and repositioned to survive the end of days
