I’m on my fifth day in Covid Land, or maybe it’s the sixth. I miss tasting things. Sometimes, I feel miserable. I’m tired of being tired.  I’m tired of always wanting to nap but never being able to sleep. My throat is sore from coughing, and my ribs are tired of breathing.

It’s okay to feel low. I know how much worse it could have been. I know I would almost certainly be dead if Covid found me several years ago.

I can’t be cheerful all the time, but even Covid doesn’t take my hope away.

This is just another path to cross, and my heart bleeds for nameless and hopefully millions who never made it to the other side and are remembered only by those who knew and loved them.

When I get low, I often turn to one of my favorite Mary Olive poems, Summer Day.

She has no time for self-pity. Neither do I. I don’t have to feel good all of the time.  There is no excuse for wasting a day, not even Covid, not even the awful news they are drowning us with.

What do I plan to do with this wild and precious day? I’ll start by reading this poem by Mary Oliver.

 

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“Who made the world?
Who made the swan and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes?
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?”

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Mary Oliver