15 (Personalized) Mostly Sincere Things To Do and Be During Social Distancing

Preface: I can't say any of these things actually will make you feel better, but some of them worked for me. I can't say they're entirely appropriate or safe (or even very nice). What I can say is, this is the time to let our strange, resilient creativity shine. So, colored very much by my own biases, experiences, and love for you, here is my list of 15 Mostly Sincere Things to Do and Be During Social Distancing.

1. When you are paralyzed by fear, the natural inclination is to numb, to physically and mentally stay in one place, to collapse into your gut and chest, to think that this controls you, that it is you. It isn't, and the deepest part of you knows it even now. Do a little learning about awareness, to ground you in how to recognize this will pass (on its own timeline, not yours, gosh darnit). And then, make your own list, or use mine. "Practice resurrection." -Wendell Berry
2. Walk around your neighborhood, look people in the eye, and say hi. If you genuinely want to know, also ask "How are you?" (Stay six feet away...this is the US...it's perfectly normal to do so, unfortunately...and wash your hands when you come back)
3. Speaking of going "outside," break your cultural bubble. Contact friends from international travel and living. Dig through your basement for books you haven't touched in awhile--pictures books with castles, mummies, cliffs--anything sublime or eternal, anything that reminds you what a blip in the cosmos you are (no offense--you're also beautiful and immeasurably important). Listen to music you don't understand.
4. If you're like me, come from a relatively privileged background, and have lived/worked outside that bubble, it's tempting to fall into the age-old, "But others have it so much worse than I, and I should be doing more" trap. Name what you can do, consider whether you can push those boundaries open a bit, and do those things. But also, name that it will never be enough. Then, go eat something tasty from your pantry.
5. Try to distract your neighbors' dogs when they go outside by making slightly nebulous high-pitched noises. There's also cat that always hangs out on the fence for hours at a time and doesn't move. Make a fool of yourself trying to get her attention. What's her problem anyway?
6. You know what? Make a fool of yourself, period. BE! RIDICULOUS! Sit on chairs differently. Break into jumping jacks. Practice noises and funny faces in the mirror. Wear your silliest, loudest shirt when you do go outside. Maybe also pajama bottoms, or a tuxedo. (If you live in Portland like me, no one will notice anyway)
7. Regardless of your religious/spiritual beliefs, tune in to a digital sermon or talk by a faith leader. Even if you think they are loons, they study and train to be able to be exactly what we need at times like this. And, just maybe, they know something.
8. Text people you've been hesitant to make contact with and let them know you're thinking about them and their well-being. Use a meme if necessary. Don't expect a reply.
9. Hang signs outside your window like the Italians, or break into song with your window open.
https://www.citynews1130.com/2020/03/15/italians-cooped-up-virus-cope-creativity/
10. Throw very small rocks at your neighbor's window until they genuinely think they made up the noise. (Eventually, admit it was you, and start a conversation.)
11. Explore new kinds of touch. Secret handshakes, longer and more awkward hugs. If that's not in the cards, stroke your own face. Like tracing the roundness of a newborn. Notice grooves, softness, hardness. Notice and name things so intently that your thoughts dissolve for a minute.
12. Obsessively chase the insects around your house with newspaper or a fly swatter. If you're a Buddhist, stop there.
13. For advice and composure, look to the people whom society has let fall through the cracks. They've done this before, like all the time. Follow their lead. Skype grandparents, because, let's face it, "Your grandparents were called to war. You're called to sit on your couch. You can do this."
14. "When words fail, music speaks." "The body is the antidote for the mind." "Manual labor is the cure for all lofty quarreling." "Get up offa that thing and dance til you feel better."
15. Do what you need to do to remember you're not alone. you're not alone. you're never alone. you never have been. you never will be. 

Sleeping During Storms

Saturday night in Guadalajara, mi compañera Delia and I got back to our AirBnB fifteen minutes before a hailstorm started. According to a cabbie who was quite clear about the science behind climate change, the last time it hailed in Guadalajara was at least 20 years ago. I watched the purple sky flash like a camera in a high-fashion photo shoot until two in the morning, when the wind and rain became a lullaby. The next day we found our way to a colorful shopping suburb called Tlaquepaque, where the ice in some places was still two meters high, at two in the afternoon, in 80 degree heat. Some kinds played in the piles until their hands and faces were gray with road juice.

Two days later, I visited the Jesuits-in-training at Casa Pedro Arrupe, which houses nine Jesuit novices from Latin America and the US. I attended a mini-Mass they organized in their capillita, and the encargado read a Bible passage about Jesus sleeping during a storm, then waking to calm the waves when his apostles were too terrified. A Jesuit from Costa Rica with a clear, smiling face used the passage to share his experiences visiting fozas in Honduras. Fozas are shallow mass graves on the outskirts of large cities, where thousands of bodies are poured when the police fail to identify them. Kids often go there looking for their parents, mothers for their jovenes. I visited one in 2012 and remember a young man telling me death was like buying avocados in San Pedro Sula, the murder capital of the world. Totally normal. This Jesuit disagreed—que nunca sea normalizada, la muerte injusta. May unjust deaths never be normalized.

This two-week trip to Mexico has been a vacation of contrasts. Mi novio Ben and I stayed in a Mayan community’s ecotourism cabins. All we could find to eat after 6PM was packaged food from corner stores, the only lights at night were those of stars, hundreds of jumping tick-like bugs held a rave on our shower floor, and Ben decided to name a scorpion (Rupert) he escorted off the premises with an old yogurt container. A few days later, I stayed in one of the most luxurious apartment complexes in cosmopolitan Guadalajara, in a glass building with a 360-degree view of the city and the red mountains surrounding it.

Somewhere in there, I danced for three hours on the median of a busy street with 150 other salser@s, on a street that reminded me of the highest-end parts of West LA. I visited a migrant shelter, rocked by the news of a father and his three year-old who were killed swimming the Rio Grande running out of money to apply for asylum from the violence they were escaping in El Salvador. I played fusbol with some Jesuit novitiates and a Honduran who had a major concussion from being hit by a car when he had fallen off the train heading north to the US border.

In June, I graduated with a Master’s degree in public policy from Oregon State University. I can’t shake the impression that people think I sail through school, life, vacation, friendships like a costeño on a wooden kayak through the mangroves of Celestún on the Yucatán peninsula, a natural native to the adventure. I would like to correct that impression right now. My friend’s suicide, my father’s bike accident, changes in my hearing, joints, nervous system and mental health, made this the hardest year I’ve lived through yet. Living in Nicaragua was harrowing, but mostly in a solidarity sense; I sometimes fell apart considering the role I and my people play in upholding systems of oppression worldwide. This year, suffering became personal, visceral. I remember telling several people that I no longer doubt not only the importance, but the necessity, of mindfulness, living in the present, and slowing down, because some nights I was drenched in dread of tomorrow. Connectedly, I now have a renewed, solidified sense of empathy and justice, one that is more personal, because I don’t want people to feel pain and fear like I did.

On the other hand, this year I grew closer to my resilient family. I fell in love. I earned a Master’s degree, despite thinking I’d drop out of the program. I found a job I actually think will challenge me to grow in the ways I need to, and through which I will earn enough to pay for self-care and personal space. I became a Cuban salsa dancer. I learned to pay attention to my body and my senses in ways that have woken the healthiest parts of me. And I saw Mexico for the first time.

Some friends who are aficionadas of Mexico warned me that many people think of their favorite country as rather singular, a colorful block between the US and the southern hemisphere, a little too close or too scary for adventure. Really, the country is more like a continent, a triple-rainbow of diversity and opportunity, a world power, a place that has figured out things we don’t even know we’re missing. I saw two states and many facets to this beautiful maze of a place. Some nights I collapsed into my pillow in giggles after flavorful, sensual nights. Others I stayed awake with diarrhea, or distracted by tinnitus, or chewing on the reality of the effect of climate change on farmers and the urban poor. Some days I needed more than two hands to count the beggars who asked for money or food; others I wined and dined on the finest comida yucateca.

My therapist thinks my life is going to get easier in the next year. I’m not so sure. Myself aside, I’m no stranger to the IPCC reports on the decline of global ecosystems and its disproportionate effect on marginalized populations. Some storms are going to recur, even worsen. Such thoughts live under my skin and pinch me unpredictably.

But the remarkable thing I walk away from, thanks to Mexico and the ribbon it tied around the beautiful chaos of the last two years of my life, is that I can dance, love, persist, breathe, and sleep during these storms, like I did during the hail, like Jesus did on the boat. Not only can I, I must. I think I’ll drown otherwise.

Though I no longer identify as religiously Christian, there are some things that will always move me about the faith. Do you know what the most common phrase in the Bible is? I remember a priest telling me some years ago. It’s be not afraid.

Smiling from the Inside Out

I am on the MV Kennicott. 9 floors of 20-year-old metal between me and the Inside Passage, the remote islands and connected waterways of southeast Alaska's Marine Highway. I board in Juneau, accessible only by air or sea. We're all headed to Bellingham, and 20 of the 150 of us will be sleeping for free on deck chairs in the solarium--the boat map's fancy word for a glass-covered, heat lamp deck. Three days and three nights faux-camping on plastic, but I hardly notice.

On these floors: interconnected crannies that end abruptly in RESTRICTED signs, twelve barf bag stations, jigsaw puzzles strewn half-completed on diner booths, 4-month-old rural Alaskan newspapers, a hidden movie theatre with room for 40 and advertising Coco, the smell of dust and cigarette smoke and petroleum and sea salt, and of course, recently bathed and excited and adventurous people who intentionally or necessarily opted for the ferry, and not the cruise ships. One is Roberta, a Tlingit cashier who grins and refuses to explain why her nametag reads "Trouble." Another is Ted, who has named the bears that visit the mine where he works 26 weeks a year for $120 grand.

Outside these floors: an incredible (in-credible) glassy expanse of what seems like nothing, below which dances the teeming life of the clean, temperate inside Pacific. Colors and textures that exist nowhere else in the galaxy. Orcas, herring roe, salmon, kelp forests that giggle at the size of the Amazon. Things I haven't endeavored to know much about, by virtue of my bipedalism.

Beyond the expanse: forests and mountains and glaciers that the next generation will be the last to witness. I give up scaling them because it's like counting sand grains, but I'm told this green and blue continues as designated wilderness for an area the size of Italy. One of the largest peak-to-seafloor protected areas in the world, as far from modern society as you can get without leaving our atmosphere. Ted the Bear Man tells me Admiralty Island, across the strait from the dock, houses four bears per square-mile.

All of it visible because of the strange sunshine today, which we'll be lucky enough to taste for the rest of our trip. I choose to name it magic.

The sun is setting. I walk entirely too fast with my 35-pound backpack during my first 20 minutes on board, feeling my inner kindergartner wanting to point and yell. I look back at the wake of our waves as the sun sets, and for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long, I notice myself smiling, from the inside out. I notice it there, and marvel, and chuckle, for three reasons.

First, this is the kind of smile that decides to appear with no power of mine, that is for no other mortal but me. I love humans and choose to live near and with a lot of them, but part of my smile is a realization that I strain to please them, but now the world is pleasing me. I want to ask it how much it strains to do so.

Second, so much could have gone wrong today, or any day; so much stands between living and thriving. But today, nothing did. Rather, some things did here and everywhere, but I didn't even notice. Most days I put per capita global average human thriving at around 10, and that might be generous%. Right now, I am experiencing that life is nothing but a gift, always.
Third, I renew a commitment I've made again and again since waking up to the importance of active gratitude. I recommit to observing how easily we forget sublimity. How quickly we fall from soaring to sulking, magic to mindlessness. I recommit to basking in the 100%.

Farewell on a Fiery Day

In an attempt to close this chapter better than my last one, process current events, and beef up for an active, engaged life, I wrote and now share this letter.

Dear Portland,
On the day I say goodbye to you, the world is on fire. Houston rises from rubble and another storm taunts the beleaguered Gulf. Korea, where my parents' love conceived me, reels from the shock of the North's hydrogen bomb test. Millions of cars and their idling exhaust spin upwards over the Coast Range, back to your sprawl from a Labor Day weekend on the beach. I tried to jog the dogs this morning, but ash from the sky joined my dandruff, and an iron claw grabbed my lungs. Wildfire has turned the air gray and the light yellow across the state as it consumes the growth of the most severe winter since 1950. And my friends are downtown, making the will of the people known about the Commander-in-Chief's DACA decision. They will be awake tonight, organizing around the clock to protect their families and homes from the aftermath, while I will be awake in an attic with a broken air conditioning after a burning 100 degree day. The filter is clogged with ash.
It can be said that the world is not well; it is on fire. Perhaps it never wasn't.
I thank you today for the power you have given me that is stronger still.
I name that you're highly imperfect and worse. Some have said you are a breeding ground for false comfort, complacency, technobots, hatred. I have seen the truth in these, though I am also blind to them.
But I also name my gratitude to you. When you welcomed me home for the first time in two years, I had just left the grey sprawl of Managua in an anxious knot of unprocessed goodbyes that I don't intend to recreate. I had refused to buy lunch or dinner in the airport because I felt in my body for the first time (though I had always known) that the price was enough to feed a family for a week. I was purple from guilt and shock, and weak from hunger and insomnia.
In the backseat of my parents' car, as we crossed Fremont Bridge toward their house in the Willamette Valley, I saw the green darkness of Forest Park at nighttime, dotted by the wet steel of winter skyscrapers and Christmas lights. It was all reflected, magnified, in the Willamette below. Like a city living in a raindrop. "Is it real?" I said aloud.
"Did you hear her?" Dad said to Mom. He could barely understand me through the sobs. "I think she asked if it's real."
Thank you for being real. For feeding me food I grew from leftover glass factory lots. For late-night rides from solidarity committee meetings to salsa dancing after a 50-hour work week. For bikes and beards and beer and beets and Bigfoot. For Hood (Wy-East) and Adams (Pahtoe/Klickitat) and St. Helens (Loowit) winking white in daylight in the nearby far-away.
But thank you mostly for a sort of person I have found here. They are my rain in drought. They are gigglers and dancers and nerds and wanderers. They are prophets and diplomats and anarchists and immigrants. They are survivors of divorce, and loneliness, and cancer, and rape, and racism, and homelessness, and wars, who somehow smile at me at every encounter like I am emmanuel. I cling to them when I see the world burn. They will not stop extinguishing hate and growing life. I will not stop following them.
Amid, perhaps because of, your imperfection, you are the first place I ever called home. From your southern reaches, I saw the totality of the 2017 total solar eclipse. Behind the black moon, there was the purest white diamond. Its pulsing reminded me the universe is a body. It was the sun refusing to die, life laughing boldly on. In its darkness, we gawked and and laughed and cried and danced. Me and my friends, my leaders, the survivors.
As I make home elsewhere, for now or forever?, I touch the tapestry you have woven into my daily being. I carry with me idealism, energy, honesty, sacrifice, humility, brokenness, devotion. I believe these innocences are part of the life-in-common that will save us.
I'm now on my way toward cost curves and quantitative methods and legislative history. I've noticed that my mouth is already dry as I chew these pages. I used to call these things pointless and cowardly; the real lucha is on the streets, not in the books. I am different now, maybe for the better. With a rise-and-grind in my step, I thank you for giving me the focus to delve into the next two years. On my altar I have placed the prayer of better speaking the language of power, and better returning power to those who would save us from it.

If I don't have the privilege of calling you home again, I'll be OK.
But yours forever anyhow,
Heather Mae

P.S. For those who missed the Facebook post, here's where I'm headed next. The letter is less sexy if I admit outside this postscript I'm going two hours south.

An Honest Chronicle of An Almost Adult Christmas

It's Christmas Eve morning and insomnia--Star Wars dreams, stomachaches, bloodstream residues of unnamed, bottled anxiety--means that on one of the only mornings during the year my adult life I allow my body to sleep in, I am awake at 5am and chopping at my life with an ice pick, and Christmas past and present and future are the ice block, wincing and giving, figuring out what's different.
Last night, for starters. I have been gifted with a singing voice, as were Hannah and Kristi, and the three of us went to Rose City Nursing Home and Lawrence Convalescent Center to sing carols. Don't they, context excluded, sound like places you want to be? Can't words turn coal into cake?
I suppose, the adult in me says, as we roam the halls in our Santa hats between stay-out-of-my rooms and ebullient thankyous, I prefer to be sick, old and alone in this country, in this city than in Managua, where I lived for two years, where on the average sick and old means you die, or you are given a bed in the middle of your son and daughter-in-law's house and your colon sits in dusty plastic bag because completing the colon cancer surgery is too expensive, as is a colostomy bag. But at least there are people, all day, around you, talking. Do I really prefer this country?
The child in me says, I am not sick and old. That's not my question to answer. I am a healthy songbird for the moment, who has found compassionate songbird friends. I can't help but notice all of a sudden that we are young and beautiful and different from the dining room people whose space we enter that smells like piss. A woman named Katherine asks us three times what day it is then naps as we sing. June tells us she went to kindergarten, did you really?, and a Sicilian 40-year-old with pretzel legs won't let go of my hand and sings so loud our crafted harmonies melt into cacophony. And still, we are all smiling.
Except for Calvin. Calvin walks like a tin man without oil. He is large, African American, with an innocent face, a smile more luminous than a pearl bracelet from Shane Company, and the nurses say, "You think you can sing? You should hear Calvin!" But something happened to Calvin and now he can only mutter a couple words at a time. Instead, as we sing, he closes his eyes and nods and conducts, and when we finish and move to leave, I take my Santa hat from his head and beg his pardon cuz it's my Aunt's, and he kisses Hannah's hand farewell, and then I see him crying. The adult in me says, what's he thinking? Where's he been? Did our singing light up the sky between the nighttime clouds in his body and soul, even for a moment? Does the moment count? The child in me says, I bet tears are snowflakes in disguise.
The adult is taking over. My glowing laptop screen screams LONELY. I'm 27 and have never not been single and have no siblings and for a few seconds I give into Scrooge thoughts that live like lumps in my throat and I see my future--I am in my forties-fifties-sixties but it doesn't matter, all that matters is that life is narrowing out, and now I live in an apartment that's too clean, somewhere in a high-rise building in London, alone looking out the window at nothing but white snow and black life. What have I done wrong? Where did it all go?
Quite a contrast from the colors I see through the bus window on the way home from work on December 23, 2015. I'd spent six hours staring at a computer screen, and although I love the people who pay me and how good I am at what they pay me for, I also begrudge them for being part of the system I buy into, like capitalism before Christmas morning, eating my time like a mixer eats flour, and spitting out less-than-satisfying cookies.
I made cookies this year, as I listened to Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole and Reeba and then realized they're about as satisfying to me as expired post-dinner mints. At least, I tried to make edible molasses ginger cookies. They were sweet, and bricks. Impossible to eat, really. But I did try, which I've never done before.
I also bought Christmas gifts for my family. By gifts I mean discounted chocolate bars and things they need. Solid wool socks for mother, a hat to cover my Dad's gargantuan head. It took me 20 minutes to find a parking spot at Fred Meyer, but I admit as I felt the hats and socks I felt a joy pinch. It is satisfying to give people what they want.
There's Nina, at work. She's in charge of a food justice program doing culturally appropriate outreach to diverse communities in a food desert. She works 65 hours a week and gets paid 40 for them, and supervises adults and interns who don't know what they're doing, in a neighborhood where little-to-no resources mean the best-laid plans of mice and women most often crumble into a poor attempt at molasses ginger cookies (but she tried, and they are at least a little sweet). And she had a fever during the pre-holiday rush, which meant that waking up every day squeezed her eyes and resolve into slits. But I also knew that Nina wanted a set of Christmas cards that she had seen opened at a white elephant exchange, a set called "spirit of Mississippi," showing black Mississippians made of paper mache playing bass, dancing in a circle of gifts, leaving Church on Sunday morning. It so happened I had a second set of those cards, and so I entered her cubicle as she slouched over a grant and said, "I came to cheer you up."
"HA, how'd you know I needed cheering?"
"Well, you often do." And then I watched her tear open the blue wrapping, (and you even wrapped it legit, she said) and listened as she said this is great, this is great, these are beautiful, thank you, this makes me really happy, this is so perfect, thank you, until I told her okay I got it can I leave now, and we laughed again, and went back to our computer screens.
It was fleeting, but I felt like Mrs. Claus.
Hey you grown up! says the child in me. Admit something to yourself! You want to be Mrs. Claus! I'm terrified of large groups of people, and small beings (like children, or elves), and hard work, and old age, and finding/committing to a Santa, and baking, but still the image of a bright-eyed old woman barking cheery orders in a snow-surrounded kitchen swallows the Scrooge. And I am reminded again of what growing up is--accepting the ice pick as it claws away on your limited time, of the sake of being who you know you are.
Hannah had warned us about Rose City and Lawrence. "It'll probably be depressing." What she meant was, like everything in life, if you nitpick, and think too much, and give in quite naturally to Scrooge, you'll struggle to see the designs of snowflakes (or are they tears?) and see only the lonely London night and the piss dining room.
Now that I've gotten the insomnia out, and the bloodstream anxiety is minimized, I think I'll end this with a cliche, the point of this whole season. The point is joy.
Don't sneer at my cliche. Give yourself a Christmas present and find your point. The point is that it's 7am now, and someone is making coffee in the kitchen, and I am no longer alone (if you'd stop thinking so much, says the child in me, you'd realize you never were). The point is Calvin's tears. And biking under a full solstice moon, wearing a Santa hat under a bike helmet. And caroling, and Nigerian songs with the Church choir, regardless of the adult questions marks between religion and I. And knowing that I am Mrs. Claus, not Scrooge, and joy comes, but making it last is hard work.

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty of lives and whole towns destroyed or about to be. We are not wise, and not very often kind. 

And much can never be redeemed.

Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this is its way of fighting back, that sometimes something happens better than all the riches or power in the world. It could be anything, but very likely you notice it in the instant when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

-Mary Oliver