Photo: Feeding Time

I’m getting a lot of messages from people who are alarmed about politics and pandemics. I guess it is true that our lives may be disrupted for a while, one way or the other, and the news will be especially chilling, even alarming. We worry about our souls, for our country, for our health, for our money.

For me, a time to harness my grounding skills.

When feeling urgent, I need to slow down, writes Mark Nepo in The Book Of Awakening.

In the many crises that affect my life and your life, I learned this. Unless I am gasping for breath and in need of an ambulance, urgency is a cruel and destructive illusion.

I felt a sense of urgency when I saw my friend Susan Popper lying on her couch, starving and incoherent and gasping for breath. I did call an ambulance, my urgency and the urgency of several other people ended up saving a life. The urgency was necessary.

But mostly, urgency and panic is a trick.

When feeling urgent and frightened, I need, more than ever, to be still and silent. Now, when so much outside of me feels urgent and unsettling, I need to cut the strings the events outside of me and go inside for a while. I can handle the rest.

I am wired to take in the anxiety around me, and I feel it swirling through the ether tonight, so much happening, most of it disturbing. I call upon my faith and hope.

Then I can see what’s waiting for me outside. I think of it this way, I must breathe till my breath becomes the sky, again and again.

I’m putting off the new Bishop Maginn Wish List I’m so excited about until tomorrow morning. I don’t want it to compete with pandemics and political debates. I will work to find my true self and inch through the turmoil, whatever it is.

I have two wonderful novels I’m reading, two impressive debut novels from young women. The first is spectacular, its called Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line by Deepa Anappara, an  Indian writer now living in England. Sympathetic, vivid and beautifully detailed, the story was inspired by the hundreds of Indian children who disappear every day.

It is the story of a young boy who sets out to discover what happened to his missing friends. A really stunning debut.

The other is a novel called Saint X by Alexis Schaitkin, about the murder of a young girl on vacation in the Caribbean, and her young sister’s amazing encounter with her probable killer in a Brooklyn cab many years later. I’m halfway through, I’m not sure I can stop reading.

This is not a thriller, it’s much deeper than that, a wonderful debut.

Tonight, I’m going to center myself and feel the urgencies pulling at me. With each breath, I will untie myself, one urgency at a time.