The In-Between

The redbuds, the lilacs, are in bloom as the golden bursts of forsythia fade to green, and April’s last rains nourish the soil. While I was blissfully present to this beauty, standing peacefully in a field on Sunday afternoon, a humongous deer tick took the opportunity to bore into my skull. This, after I’d finally healed from a concussion, achieved in a battle lost with an iron garden trellis that resulted in a long week of nausea, headaches, and vertigo. 

This is perhaps the best analogy of how month #14 of Covid feels to me...one painful moment or an exhausting period of time followed immediately by increasingly-more stress, all packaged neatly inside of a hopeful return to a somewhat-more-normal-than-now life. 

The pandemic feels like perhaps a new reality is just around the corner, yet those pesky new variants, folks missing their second doses, and the intensifying crisis in India and elsewhere threatens to disturb the progress we’ve made, and the sanity I sometimes have regained.

Like me, many are pondering how the never-ending stress response has impacted our overall mental health, our productivity, our collective and individual grief, coping-in-isolation, and distance from the very connections that might heal us, and the fact that we’ve been living daily with the fear of self-harm and fear of causing harm to others. 

I found some gratitude and temporary relief
on this subject, in Krista Tippet’s podcast
On Being. It was particularly helpful to know that how I’m feeling is a completely
reasonable response to the pandemic’s continuous triggering of our fight or flight
stress response. 

https://onbeing.org/programs/christine-runyan-whats-happening-in-our-nervous-systems/

Hope you and your family are healthy, and enjoying the May flowers! Join our team this week for LIVE election night coverage with State Rep. Tommy Vitolo, and our screening of this year’s Crowdsourced Boston remake of Cast Away, a collaborative community art project.

Warmly,

Kathy Bisbee, Executive Director, BIG