On March 7, I moved from Santa Cruz, California where I’d been living for a couple years making my latest album… and finding refuge after a good many years of hard-won healing after excavating past trauma and feeling the grief, profound sense of loss, and disillusionment that ensued.
I moved to Palm Springs, where I’d been envisioning myself living for some time… it’s cheaper here, I like it warm, and I could see myself growing into my late 30s and early 40s into the elegant yet still very bohemian creative woman I desire to be. And most of all to feel and be free. As free as one possibly can in this life.
In my journal at the start of this year, I had even written “New Year, New Life” several months before I knew I would be making this move and this big change. Well, it has been an even bigger change than I could have ever imagined, but I know I am far from alone in this.
We all had very different plans for this year in our lives.
And yet, while it is a very frightening daily reality we are facing around the world and particularly here in the U.S. with the spread of the Coronavirus, when death feels to be and is quite literally all around, perhaps it is the delirious sunshine down in Palm Springs, and the impossibly persistent tall and swaying palms, the constant blue sky backdrop, and the flood of butterflies passing me the other day on my social distanced walk… but I am reminded by all these things and more, what’s inside me and inside us all, that this is still life.
We all had so many different plans of what what we’d be doing and how we’d be living. But we are doing this now. Staying in. Taking care. Staying safe. Taking care of each other. Sharing and reaching out via text, social media, and a multitude of apps. We are practicing new ways of loving and being brave. We are imagining too how we will live our lives anew once this time has passed. This is all still life.
Though life has stilled for a time, it is still all around and within. It is just quieter… more precious… scary and overwhelming at so many more times, yes… but I’m reminded too that it has always been this way, beneath it all. Memento mori. The reality of life is so easily overlooked.
In this time, keep holding onto your dreams. Hold onto hope. Hold onto your vision of the future. But know that here in this time is still life. Tend to it, care for it, give all that you can to it, and may life still live to unfold.
"Immersive amaryllis" by kathrynalkins is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
