Coronavirus diaries

I wanted to write along with Donna; we had a conversation about remaining in a relationship of awe and dumbfounded awareness toward the multiplicity of challenges related to the coronavirus epidemic. We proposed to choose to engage with the fear of God rather than the fear of self. The fear of self being the fear that I will not have the resources inside me; and then that the system in which I am nested, cannot compensate, to manage what may come. And even the language of management is born of a life that has contingencies and fallbacks; it is a hundred layers of protection and yet also one invisible virus and a blown curve away from being left gasping and triaged in a panicked hospital hallway.

And the fear of God being the acknowledgement that we live with a wild and demanding God; one who reveals and requires; negotiates not at all. The thing may come; it may demand everything; it may give even as it takes; it may create beauty or desolation or both in its path; I am a human creature; I can respond only with awe, with acceptance, with fury; ultimately my very most is just laughter and tears; puny fist shaking in the air; balloon game with squealing child; moment of relief spliced to moment of fear.

Loneliness. A sucking vacuum made of asbestos glass rushing like oxygen pumped into the lungs. Not aloneness but loneliness; the basic primitive fear of abandonment, it underlies this epidemic. We will not be held, we will not be cared for, there will not be enough support in the system and we or those we love will die. We are left licking a precipitate of dew off the cave wall in which we are trapped to keep from dehydrating entirely; unsure if anyone knows we are inside.

The word abandonment comes from the Latin and Old French for "to relinquish control". I abandon myself to abandonment. Over and over I abandon any idea that I can do other than abandon. I am abandoned and I abandon; in the face of the giant God moving over the face of the earth; I abandon my self into the truth of being over doing. I welcome the abandonment; it offers no consolation; it keeps my head to the wind; I rage against it but am subdued to it; it is the storm; I am a tiny creature; I relinquish the path of control; even my relinquishment makes no noise.