Like all of us, I am dealing with this weird pandemic world the best I can. Walking through fog, waiting, wondering…these are the things that await us each morning when we rise. Some people are drinking a lot of coffee. I’ve been wandering around the neighborhood looking at flowers and birds. For these past days, as my morning trip to the health club has been replaced (unintentionally, I might add) with this ever lengthening morning search for signs of life, I’ve started taking a picture or two and sharing it on social media with an occasionally pithy comment. And now, I’ve decided to capture these musings for “posterity” as part of my blog-o-sphere. Here is my post from March 18, 2020:

Looking back (June 10, 2021): It took a little effort to figure out just where the process of #pandemicpractice began for me, but that figuring out was important. I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to obsess either, but as I read over and over again the ways in which we as a culture selectively “forget,” collectively “forget,” I am ever more driven to counter that tendency, at least in my own life. And so I sat for hours on social media, going through my posts during these times, looking at my pictures, remembering my walks. This, I believe, was the beginning of a sense of purpose in what I was doing.

I know that I had, by this date, been walking in the mornings for about two weeks. I am able to trace that date back to a spiritual direction appointment on my calendar — an appointment that became my very first virtual appointment because I had just received the news that the Seminary had been exposed to the new virus through Patient 0 in Washington, D.C. That day, I moved my appointment and I stopped going to the gym to workout. This was several days before the shutdown of life as we knew it became city-wide.

This post, these azaleas, represent my first attempt to look past my fear and see what I was walking through every morning. Until this moment, I was walking with the power of pure adrenaline.