Pandemic — Lyssa Adkins

Pandemic

What if you thought of it

as the Jews consider the Sabbath—

the most sacred of times?

Cease from travel.

Cease from buying and selling.

Give up, just for now,

on trying to make the world

different than it is.

Sing. Pray. Touch only those

to whom you commit your life.

Center down.

And when your body has become still,

reach out with your heart.

Know that we are connected

in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.

(You could hardly deny it now.)

Know that our lives

are in one another’s hands.

(Surely, that has come clear.)

Do not reach out your hands.

Reach out your heart.

Reach out your words.

Reach out all the tendrils

of compassion that move, invisibly,

where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love--

for better or for worse,

in sickness and in health,

so long as we all shall live.

--Lynn Ungar 3/11/20

http://www.lynnungar.com/poems/pandemic/

———————-

Touch only those to whom you commit your life.

This week, watching the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy and imagining what we are likely to go through in the US, my sphere of concern shrunk to something super small: Three senior citizens. Three homes. Two states. 

My husband, my parents and I talked about the various combinations of how we would take care of one another should one or more of us contract COVID-19. We talked about each person getting sick and who would come to help them. We talked about the possibility that some of us might be left to our own devices depending on who is sick and when. The thought of one of my parents, sick in their home, and me not being able to help brought me face-to-face with a lack I have felt for some time now. The lack of community. 

Do not reach out your hands. Reach out your heart. 

My heart has been under guard these last years with my neighbors. Fearful to talk lest we come up against some strong difference of opinion. Fearful to learn about the sharp edges that divide us. I'm not so fearful today. I'm actually not that concerned about opinions and divisions today. 

Faced with the prospect of being homebound and needing food, or someone to check on my mom, the fears and the guards have all relaxed. With COVID-19 on the horizon, I instead feel an opening, the reaching out of my heart. I feel the genuine possibility of community renewal.  

Know that our lives are in one another’s hands. (Surely, that has come clear.)

Tomorrow, a note will be placed on everyone's mailbox in my neighborhood. It will open the door for community support through a WhatsApp group that will deliver requests for help and compassion, should people become sick. Maybe, through our support of one another, I will find community in my own neighborhood. Not a community based on common interests or shared political views, certainly not that, but one created from the inescapable realization that we need one another, literally. Perhaps from my neighborhood, and from neighborhoods all over the US, we will collectively find a more loving perspective from which to view our differences and a much broader field in which to feel our unity.