March 2020, Silent Spring. . .

This morning I stepped onto the street and was caught by a peculiar silence rarely heard in Vancouver.  Broadway was bare.  The traffic lights signalled to empty space.  The city appeared a ghost town, only its shell remained.

The protagonist in Daniel Dafoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, relayed his experience of a contagion that devasted London in 1665.  He noticed fewer people on the streets, and witnessed the burial of innumerable corpses in mass graves.  The same eerie silence that haunted London now visits cities all over the world as the COVID-19 pandemic lays grip to nations across continents.

Like Dafoe, I am inclined to take to the pen in this time of peril.  The COVID-19 pandemic is an extraordinary event that has brought the globe to a sudden halt.  Beyond the serious health crisis and the convulsive shock to the world economy, the pandemic unsettles tacit and pervasive myths about the human project, and the unstoppable march of progress. A disruption of this magnitude warrants reflection.  However, unlike Dafoe, I do not intend to offer a first-person account of unfolding events.  Rather, I am drawn to matters of the heart, and those hidden stores of resilience, wisdom, and courage that can help all of us live through this trying time.

There are so many blogs out there, why another scratch over the palimpsest?  I do not presume to offer anything of unique and rare value.  Somehow, thinking of the countless strangers who are confined in self-isolation, perhaps fraught with anxiety, but also rivetted to the screen in torrents of information and amusement, I want to offer another option for those coping with uncertainty and fear. I think of the high school teenagers I once taught.  What guidance and assurance would I give them to help them cope?  I think of the young teacher-candidates with whom I work. How might I be of service and assistance?  This blog is an offering to those who can use some perspective, some friendly musings and playful suggestions as we enter into a dark time.

Why am I qualified to speak on these matters?  I have never lived through a pandemic, nor have I experienced an extended quarantine.  However, I have lived alone in the woods for close to a year, and know well the manifold textures of solitude.  I know how to discover a cosmos within  a 300 square-foot cabin, how to forge a friendship with the birds and trees around me.  Through Zen practice, I have become a student of discomfort and suffering, a taster of what David Whyte calls “the single malt essence of our reluctance to be here.”  My practice is coming back to the present, facing the fresh challenge of each moment, exactly as it is. Far wiser sages have preceded me, but that should not disqualify me from muttering a few thoughts.  The ancients supply the ageless wisdom for what I now offer in a contemporary idiom.  If you find these entries helpful, I will be glad.  If you don’t find them helpful, relegate them to oblivion.

During the pandemic, I am interested in exploring the following: How to face fear, how to navigate anxiety, how to grieve, how to make the best of solitude. Each theme is a brief reflection on matters of the inner life in difficult circumstances.  And since brevity is the soul of wit, I shall limit each entry to less than a thousand words.

The physician Edward Trudeau once said: “the purpose of medicine is to cure sometimes, to relieve often, to comfort always.”  I am not a doctor, so I must leave the curing, and the relieving to health-care professionals — whose work is always laudable, but now warrants our utmost appreciation.  I do hope, however, to offer some comfort during these treacherous times.  May these words be a balm to weary souls.

DC.