Tuesday, April 14, 2020

I can't remember a time in my life when I ever felt so alone and so connected simultaneously. It's strange, confusing, touching, moving, sad, sweet, and breathtakingly beautiful all jumbled up together. I know that I have had times when I was more alone - August 2006 when I sent my youngest to college and drove to the Eastern Shore of Virginia with a moving truck full of everything I owned, alone, and armed only with a heart full of hope. Or the long winter of 2010-2011, when I was hunkered down in a log cabin on top of a mountain with just my sweet dog Baby and my weirdo cat Buster for company, trying to make sense out of a wrecked life, a wrecked love,  a wrecked dream. Or the summer of 2017, when I was still grieving my mother's death and my sweet Baby died, leaving me with a house too quiet to be stood, but no energy to go anywhere other than work because anything more was just too much for me to manage.

This pandemic and the need for social distancing (isolation) and the fear that comes with it, this aloneness is different, more heavy, more necessary, more important, but somehow much harder. It has been a long, long time since I have felt want of or desire for someone to share my day-to-day life and all the intimacy that entails. But that wanting is there. Is it the same for you others who live alone? I want a hand to hold. I want a shoulder to lean on. I want to curl my belly along the curve of someone's back and draw myself in close, listen to someone's dreaming as I fall asleep (or lie sleepless!), and feel the rise and fall of the breath of life moving in and out of someone's chest. I want to be driven crazy by someone's proximity! I want to cringe at the sound of someone chewing with mouth wide open! I want. It is as plain as that. I want.

I have come home to my music, at least. At last. In my music, I find a connection and an intimacy with my inner ....... what? Spirit? Being? Artist? Soul? God?  "Yes" is my answer there. All of those things and something that doesn't have a word in any language that I know. I am so grateful to have crossed the many miles I had to travel to find my way back home to that part of me. I knew that I was missing it, but I didn't know I was missing myself for lack of it. But I was.

So in the midst of loss and grief and sorrow and solitude and confinement and longing, I find a deep wellspring of gratitude. I have always said that gratitude will save your life. I know that, many times now, it has saved mine. I am grateful for the joy and comfort I find in letting my fingers find their way along the next of my guitar - a way they know by heart. I am grateful for the beauty I see all over the world, in Facebook pictures and You Tube videos, of people coming together and opening their hearts. I am grateful for friends reaching out, touching base, reconnecting. I am grateful for dreams of touching another person one day, hugging tightly, kissing sweetly, laughing softly, resting my head against the chest of another and hearing the soft thumping of a heart in motion.

I am hopeful that I will survive this as will all of the people I love so dearly.

I am hopeful. And I am grateful to be home. However lonely it might feel, I am safe and I am well and I can keep singing, praying, hoping, and whispering "thank you" as the dawn breaks on another day.

Peace, y'all.


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