“Cosmo, I just want you to know that no matter what you do, you’re still gonna die. Okay?”
(Moonstruck)
Spring
There’s a lot of people out walking. We’re all walking for the sake of walking, moving around, one foot in front of the other, going nowhere. But the sun is shining and it’s either walk or stay inside glued to some screen, working on my terrible posture while morbidly tracking statistics. As Mark Twain (possibly) said, “There are three kinds of lies. Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” The mainstream media, social media and the self-proclaimed experts are offloading their wares in all three categories non-stop these days, but I’m not interested in buying so I head outside instead in a daily quest to get the step count into a self-satisfying range. I walk past the densely packed homes in my district and inspect my neighbours’s flower beds for plant inspiration; trying not to grow too attached to the idea of a front yard full of bosomy peonies in all their glory. I need shade plants of the sort that L.M Montgomery might have waxed poetic in one of her novels. Shy greenery and tiny winsome blooms that thrive in the whispering shadows. They are hard to find though, most people don’t bother much with trying to make things grow in inhospitable places.
I pick up my pace and reflexively glance at a my disappointing number of steps. Keep it moving, unless you want to gain the Covid-19. (Too late.) I come to the end of the houses and pass by the construction sites with newly printed signs hung on the fences warning the tradesmen to work in specific ways while under the cloud of this novel corona virus. “Novel Coronavirus”, the news anchors wearing jewel tones say it with such solemnity.
I consider titling my next book, Novel Coronavirus. Of course, I would have to start a brand new manuscript for it—none of the three works-in-progress could carry such a moniker. Search engine optimization would undoubtedly be in my favour;— for all that marketing and promotion that I am (supposed to be) doing.
The toe of my shoe catches slightly on an uneven lip in the sidewalk and I pitch forward as though shoved by a foe. I catch myself in the sudden rush of adrenalin and feel my face grow slightly warm at the thought that someone at the construction site saw me. Like that time in high school when a new pair of shoes with a thicker sole (Damn you, platform Converse trend!) caught the lip of a step and sent me sprawling up the central staircase. Arms valiantly windmilling, I caught the hand rail with both hands; hauling myself—hand over hand—up the last few steps while my legs dangled uselessly behind me. I vaguely wonder if platform Converse are still a thing as I regain my stride and keep walking as though nothing has happened. After all, I’m no teenager battling insecurity anymore. I can shake off an embarrassment. Besides, since I can’t help but laugh at physical comedy, I can hardly resent providing it for some poor soul peeking out behind the curtains. I see a lot of them these days;—people staring out their front windows, or standing in their doorway looking out on the world. It’s a strange thing to see so many people doing it. We’re all looking out the window as though we might see the end of the plague coming down the street.
I leave the construction site behind and walk past the barren lot covered with weeds still thinking about the signs on the fences. Will future people unearth these weathered metal signs in curio shops and marvel that they were hung during the scourge of COVID-19? Will they blow away the dust gathered in the intervening decades, read the public health instructions and find us quaint? Perhaps these future people will collect them as memorabilia of this bygone era; hanging them ironically around their homes. But instead of “Keep Calm and Carry On” emblazoned on everything from coffee mugs to pillow cases, and Rosie the Riveter displaying her bicep and can-do attitude; it will be the anemic messaging of “Stay Home. Stay Safe” and “Practice Social Distancing”. Hardly the inspirational stuff of two generations ago, but maybe our fearful measures will seem endearing to the people of the future in the same way that we find leeches and blood-letting curious medical treatments of the past. “Oh, those ignorant little dears, they just did the best that they could. Like superstitious children, they were…”
Because, after all, isn’t that how we all tend to view the collective wisdom of previous generations? We assume that whatever we have attained in the present age is better than what came before it. Our attitudes are more virtuous. Our thinking more nuanced. Our societies have evolved. That’s a pet peeve of mine: the usage of the word evolved. It’s a badge to show your bona fides. You didn’t learn something. You evolved. Learning requires effort, pursuit, discernment and practice. Evolution requires nothing of the individual except a fortunate set of genes. My mind wanders backward to a bygone biology class showing Darwin’s drawing of the beaks of Galapagos finches who found the right sized seed for the times. “Darwin’s Beak” might also be a good title for a book. Maybe it could be about the way that we think we are advanced and wise when really we are just the ungratefully fortunate beneficiaries of all that came before.
My gaze falls upon the thistles that are getting along like gang-busters in the empty lot. Deep green and thriving; their stalks are thicker than my thumb as they pass the three foot mark. Those spines are more dangerous than a lot of items confiscated by airport security;—including the new tube of toothpaste I lost on my way to Vancouver a few years ago. What a different world that was. Being able to leave one place and fly to another. We didn’t even know how free we were.
But a lot of people don’t feel that way, I realize, and it shocks me. “Free” is just an abstract idea to them—and a dangerous one—whereas “safe” is the ultimate good. The sudden intrusion of government power hasn’t rankled some the way it has me. But the petty tyrants are popping up everywhere and their calls to the quarantine-related snitch lines reveal just how thin our social fabric has worn. When this plague has subsided, will it be airport security that demands passengers wear masks, or will it be the finger wagging of other passengers who demand it? I think know the answer already and it depresses me. But maybe this madness of control will pass as fatigue with the fear of life and death begins to set in.
I doubt it—but maybe.
Summer
I’m still walking—the same route around the empty lots and the place where the school buses are parked, lined up neatly in two long rows like yellow pills in the hands of an OCD apothecary. ‘Apothecary’ is such a fun word, while ‘pharmacist’ has had all the whimsy wrung out of it. The buses haven’t moved in months, empty of their charges, even as the playground nearby languishes in prison; blockaded behind a steel fence meant to keep everyone oh-so-safe from a virus with a 98% survival rate. I shake my head and keep moving. The thistles have bloomed spiky purple crowns and begun to die in the summer heat. The ground around them is cracked and parched and, I kid you not, tumbleweeds are rolling by me in a perfect picture of western desolation as a hot wind gusts over the face of the land. If only I had a faded cotton print dress on and a sunburned face to complete the picture. But I don’t. I put on sunscreen because I’ve been conditioned to do so by the fear of “the effects of aging”. Same, I suppose, as all the people wearing masks to keep an unseen virus at bay;— or away from other people— or to show what good people they are… It’s hard to keep track of the reasons for our measures anymore. Gone are the “wash your hands” and “don’t touch your face” instructions from mid-March. We’ve entered into some new phase of counter measures. You can feel it in the atmosphere. I think about getting a bunch of cloves of garlic on a string to wear around my neck, you know, in case this coronavirus just also happens to be a vampire.
A car passes me and the driver’s features are obscured by a swath of light blue fabric. He’s all alone in his car wearing a surgical mask and I want to ask him who he is protecting. Did he just forget to take it off? Or is that “PPE” doing a better job than the steel and glass of his car in protecting him from the danger of a COVID miasma in case he should happen to drive through one. I could ask the black masked bicyclist who rode by too—but he wasn’t around long enough to chat.
It doesn’t really matter, though. The message is clear. Stay safe. Stay safe. Stay safe… it’s on constant repeat from the government, the businesses that have finally been allowed to open, the signs in the windows of private homes; not to mention the messages from the glitterati on their social media platforms desperate for relevancy. Stay safe. One could be forgiven for thinking that the phrase has been trademarked and is earning cents on the dollar every time it is used in conversation.
I want to escape but there’s no where to go. Even the astronauts who left Earth’s problems behind on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule on May 30th had to come back to its shelter eventually on August 3rd. What must that be like, I wonder, to go into a hostile atmosphere that requires every ingenuity of Man in order to survive? In space, you’ll know whether your mask works or not.
I shake my head again, wishing to shed the tiresome subject like a dog shakes water from his coat. I look at the beauty of the billows of white stacking up on the horizon against Alberta’s impossibly blue August sky. The sky is bluer here than in other places. I don’t know why, but it’s true. More so than ever before in my life, heaven is calling. This world is not my home, and I’m feeling it. There’s a row of poplars swaying their hips in breeze and somehow the fluttering of the leaves makes it seem as though time has stood still even though I’m still walking and the cars are whooshing by with snatches of their music reaching my ears. The atmosphere of the culture has been oppressive and like the summer heat that breaks into a terrific storm, I can’t help but wish for lightening to crack with a deafening boom and roar and reshuffle the deck of cards that we’re all playing with.
Autumn
The trees are shedding their gold leaf to pave the gutters and the flowers are beginning to look weary. For the first time since this juggernaut of Fear began, it feels as though something might be beginning to shift—to crack—letting the light get in a la Leonard Cohen. It’s faint and glimmering, and sometimes I can’t catch sight of it at all, but more and more the artifice feels like it is beginning to crumble.
I breathe a sigh of relief and feel myself walking faster; walking taller as a smile spreads across my face like a wave flooding the shore. This is what I’ve been missing for months and months—the gladness of faith in the goodness of today. The leaves swish and crunch under the soles of my shoes. The air is as crisp and sweet as the first bite of the apple harvest. It has been ages since it felt like there was something to be glad about. It has been ages since I felt like singing just for the joy of it.
I’m rounding the way back toward home. The distance is shortening all the time, and as I walk along part of me wants to turn aside and add to the journey, walking further and longer because this is the day that the Lord has made for me to rejoice and be glad in it. And, why shouldn’t I? Why rush back to a chair and the loud voices who wish to direct my thoughts and words toward their aims? I only owe my allegiance to God. He holds me in the palm of His hand and He made this day for gladness. It washes over me in a slow—bearable—realization, that this has been true for each day in this miasmic season of fear.
Only I can give place in my thoughts to desolation because this wide beautiful world wears its griefs on its face while it tells lies with pathological abandon; because mankind is a ruin of wonderful intentions. Because even the people you love and admire will disappoint, betray and misunderstand you.
So I turn aside—like Moses—to enjoy this thing that He is doing. To listen for the words that He is speaking; to keep walking wherever He leads. “Perfect love casts out fear”, and what is perfect love but God Himself?
Winter
It’s coming on Christmas but it only feels like it when the snow falls down in big flakes and gets caught in the faux fur on my hood. I’m walking in different shoes these days and taking smaller steps; shuffling along over the slippery patches with only a few adrenalin-inducing losses of balance. Animals have left their footprints in the snow as well; leaving me to muse over their tracks of differing intentions.
Halloween’s ghoulish decorations are disappearing—though the forgotten pumpkins are getting more and more ghastly in their frigid decay on front steps. Sparkle and red is beginning to dot the city like stars appearing the the night sky as people trim up their doors for the new season with holly and pine boughs bedecked with ribbons and bows to greet all the guests we aren’t supposed to invite over. There is a perverse irony to the solemnity with which the experts and political leaders are talking of cancelling Christmas. There was another leader who felt that the coming of Christ was too dangerous, as well. King Herod the Great mandated the Slaughter of the Innocents in order to lockdown the coming of the Messiah, as it were.
All of summer’s flowers are frozen into twisted clumps of branches and twigs; denuded of their leaves and contorted by the icy breath of winter and a weight of snow. It isn’t as easy to keep walking at this temperature. There’s something about the cold that makes you feel weary. It’s the deadly deception of the frozen North: the temptation to fall asleep in the snow. The wind cuts through the folds in my clothes and my eyes begin to water. It’s hard to imagine lying in a drift and falling asleep, perhaps because the snow isn’t deep enough to be an inviting bed, but it also isn’t quite cold enough to give up yet.
Winter has a way of killing things—and it’s a good thing, too. On the insect front alone, it is a really good thing. There’s a lot of stuff that grows in the comfort of the temperate zone that needs a deep frost to wipe out. But good things die back in winter too and so it makes us afraid. I was rewatching that old series Pioneer’s Quest: A year in the Real West—where two couples lived as homesteaders in Manitoba with only the tools and means that would have been available in 1860. They built their shelters. They took care of the animals they needed to plow the land. They sowed and harvested their crops by hand. They experienced failure and had to depend on neighbours for knowledge and help. They got sick and it was scary. It was hard, hard work—and they loved it.
Besides the personal inconveniences of no indoor plumbing or toilet paper—what struck me was their focused awareness of the season. How imperative understanding the times and the seasons were for their very survival. Plant your crops too late in the spring and you’ll starve in the winter. Spring, summer and fall are the seasons of intense productivity. Winter is the season of trust; where we must believe that on the other side of all this cold and death, there will be a resurrection.
Things are coming to the surface in us all—the idols—the gods that we fear. Whether it is fearing death from a disease, or tyranny brought in under the auspices of combatting it, or whether it is feeling virtuous for meeting all the ever-ballooning measures, or feeling justified in ignoring each instance of government overreach--idols, all. They can all be ideas that we serve with fear and trembling, without realizing that they aren’t gods at all. Fear, and its hand-maiden, Self-righteousness, must die in the cold of this season so that what is true and real remains. The homesteaders knew it back in the day, and we’re learning it again: our lives are in God’s hands—always.
It has always been thus--; but we've forgotten it. We've come to trust in the illusion of our own control. In the prudent and responsible use of seat belts and helmets; healthy diets and good exercise; masks and hand sanitizer, and so on. But then the Winter of Circumstance comes and destroys the illusions of our strength and betrays our truly fragile state. We may rage against it and attempt to reassert our control through the proclamation of Science™ and rule by experts, and schoolmarming one another with wagging fingers and calls to snitch lines, but the fact remains unchanged by the depths of Winter's death: we are so fragile. And, we cannot forget it.
This awareness of our fragility presents us with a war of perspectives. To give rein to fear; seeking to return to the comfort of the illusion of our control. Or, to rest in that intangible faith that the loving Father who sent His only Son to save us carries us in the providence of His will.
This winter is long and dark, but the resurrection is coming. Just keep walking.
