Breath During a Pandemic
This past March and April, during the height of the pandemic, I found my sweet spot. Ironically, it was on I-271 northbound. I have driven this corridor for four years. The freeway has become liminal space, the traveling place between locations of security. All during the chilly spring months, I traveled back and forth, back and forth, between my home and a home for residential teens. As an “essential worker” piecing together an existence between agency work, private family therapy practice, and spiritual direction, I no longer had to share the road during March, April, and most of May with the thousands of commuters who were relegated to home. Yes, like everyone else behind the wheel, I was panicking about everything. Changes in routine. Cuts in income. Concerns about fatalities. But the minority report is this: my 87-minute commute had been cut in half. And I learned to cut off the news, to drive my 2014 Honda sanctuary for 42 minutes of orderly quiet.
That season of order on the road was very fragile and short-lived. In the chaos of Ohio’s reopening last month, the red tail lights have returned with bumper to bumper back-ups. The orange cones have been moved to new sections of pot-holed concrete, reminders that we humans are always trying to fix a mess we have made. Now I share I-271 again with a fleet of commuters. Nissans, Chevrolets, and the frequent BMW. We are white-knuckling our way to the illusion of some kind of routine, listening to podcasts about cooking, true crime, confederate flags and BLM, knowing we should still all be at home, worrying that to stay home much longer means an economic tank. And so, prudent or not, the highway is filled once again. Each drivers’ head is filled with chaos. Truly, there has been nothing but chaos this year.
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Off the freeway, in the contained quiet of a one-hour session, I sat with a spiritual direction companion yesterday morning. We social-distanced at about seven feet. We wore our masks. We sat outside in a corner of my backyard. We worked hard to control what small things we could in the presence of an uncontrollable virus. But still, the tears flowed. We were grieving the loss of it all. Community gatherings. Family. Safe travel. Lives. In my quiet backyard reality hit us like the flood of threat that it is. In my small Ohio city, in every small and large region across this globe, I am sure that the tidal waves of grief are steady. The usual anchors are lost to us in the chaos of this storm called COVID. Threats to peace are even remembered in a spiritual direction session.
Spiritual direction is a misnomer. I - with my appointment calendar and my GPS - direct no one in this chaos. I am as wrecked as the next person. Yet, something always happens in a spiritual direction session. Spirit shows up as the Director, waving her flag like an attendant at an accident, directing traffic to safety, saying, “Look over here!” Truly, I looked. In my spiritual direction time at home, away from the freeway, two cardinals were sharing a branch in the cedar tree above our heads. Sunshine was dappling the side yard. July morning breeze was teasing the rising thermometer. My dog, dear Zia, was snoozing at my feet. We held our breath in a shared moment when uncertainty was suspended. For a moment, in the bounty of summer, during the liminal space between ordinary moments, my spiritual companion and I remembered the Hebrew story: order out of chaos.
The Hebrew Bible, written millenia before I-271 was constructed, is an anchor for Jews and Christians. In the first breaths from the book of Genesis, someone long ago wrote about the transformation from chaos to order. The literal translation of those first few words from Hebrew is, “When Elohim began to create,” referring to the grandiose God of Israel, the Creator. What follows is an orderly account depicting a process of chaos reformed into structure. “Tohu vavohu” is the transliterated phrase from the second verse, meaning some kind of primordial chaos over which the Creator hovered with a breath of life. Elohim took uninhabited, wild time, and corralled it into day and night. This hovering, pottering presence, molded unformed chaos into boundaried seas and rooted trees. Popular Christian culture has often bulldozed over important translation of texts and has turned God into some kind of magic genie who created ex nihilo – from nothing. But a close reading of the very first words of ancient text teach us that chaos is real. Moreover, so far in the history of the universe, God has yet to wipe out bad guys. It seems we might be stuck with chaos for a while.
In the spiritual direction session we talk about handing over to God the unbounded chaotic fears of our upended pandemic-obsessed lives. It is a hard gig.
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I am a bit scared this week with cases in the U.S. up significantly. I drive on the freeway amidst increased traffic, handmade mask swinging from my rear-view mirror. I’m heading to the grocery store to walk one-way up an aisle and to stand six feet from the previous customer at the register. These are the measures we impose on ourselves. Trying to order what feels uncontainable.
In the unlikely space of the produce aisle I touch a lemon. It was certainly transported on freeways by a truck from an exotic west coast or Florida tropical fruit grove, a state where COVID-19 cases have increased ten-fold in one month. In a quick, non sequitur moment, grief floods me. I wonder how long I will be able to purchase lemons. A number of variables could cause my lemon fast: shortages in produce due to the pandemic’s effect on agriculture, my own difficulties in face-to-face grocery shopping, economic hardship that leaves my household to budget in new ways. Suddenly one lemon seems to be a harbinger of dread. I quickly drop the fruit, abandon my cart, and leave the store, staying consciously clear of others as I wind my way to the exit. I race to my car and sit behind the wheel. I am sobbing a season-worth of fear, snot running beneath the mask I have not yet discarded.
I am in the parked car for twenty minutes or so. My 2014 Honda sanctuary is hot in the July sun, sitting on black top. I mutter a confession for air conditioning running. My hybrid vehicle seems like some kind of poor compromise intended to soothe my consumer guilt. Yet in this makeshift tabernacle I offer a prayer. I breathe. I know that the oxygen molecules which fill my lungs have been traveling the globe for uncountable millenia. Trees have sighed the O2 from their growth, transforming my wasted carbon monoxide into something fundamentally necessary for life. Birds have nestled in those same trees. And lemons have grown. I do not understand the process of rebirth and ordered existence. In this liminal space of parking lot prayer, I simply breathe.
