Tomorrow I enter my seventh week in isolation from the COVID-19 pandemic. I am no stranger to loneliness, but this stretch brings new meaning to the concept. No physical touch, no casual hug, in fact no face-to-face greeting whatsoever, other than the crinkled eye above a mask in recognition and gratitude to a grocery worker. Everything – the symphony, the ballet, choir, and a visit from my daughter over the Easter weekend – has been cancelled.
So, in an effort to remain calm and focused, and maybe even to accomplish something, I devised a daily curriculum for myself. (I’m guessing you have, too!) I even developed a physical map for my activities so that I could more fully appreciate and enjoy my home, not to mention avoid falling into in a spatial rut. (You may not have gotten this geeky!) Indeed, I have started to feel fully 4-dimensional.
And if you think this is a very boring blog post, I couldn’t agree with you more, but it’s all I’ve got for now.
I leap out of bed around 6 am, shower and change my clothes (very important!), feed the cat, make the coffee (also very important!), grab the newspaper (yes a real one!), make some breakfast, and curl up with the cat in my study’s enormous white canvas-covered chair (from IKEA) for a few hours of contented news-digesting, crossword puzzling, and email corresponding. Sometimes, I even write a real letter to my daughter or a friend.
Midmorning, I climb up to my newly cleaned and re-organized attic to take a ZOOM yoga class through my Point Reyes Station studio. That brings me to 10:30-ish, when I descend back into my study and settle into my desk to work on my latest Coursera class. Right now I’m taking a course in Ancient Roman Architecture, and I started a fresh sketchbook to make quick drawings of the monuments as we encounter them. It’s this month’s moon cycle project (see post of March 8), so I have to be diligent to fit an entire semester into one month.
Next is lunch in the garden (my first moon cycle project!) with the cat, followed by more coffee (very important) and reading. For this module, I re-position myself (and cat) in my quiet attic, which is refreshed by a breeze through casement windows at its lengths. Now four stories above the street, I have a lovely view of San Francisco when I look up to relax my eyes and settle more deeply into the afternoon. With so much time to explore, reading can get kind of crazy up there. In addition to our book club selections (this month’s were haiku poet Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Deep North” and “The Pine Islands” by Marion Poschmann), I’m taking in Jean Shinoda Bolen’s “Goddesses in Every Woman” (possibly more about this in a future post) and Brian Greene’s “The Elegant Universe”, two books that just happened to be lying about (and now I have no excuse not to read them).
Then, if I manage to stay awake through all that, I might pull a few weeds or tidy up one room or another before venturing outside for a late afternoon walk, uphill to the Sutro forest trails, downhill to Kezar Stadium and Golden Gate Park, or comparatively flat to my neighborhood in Cole Valley or the Inner Sunset. Later, it’s whipping up some kind of dinner on my beloved indoor grill followed by the PBS NewsHour online. (Miss you, Gwen Ifill.) And after all of that, I give in to mindless sloth as I crawl back into bed with the cat, a jar of almond butter and a spoon, and succumb to binge-watching one series or another – Chernobyl, recommended by my daughter (it is amazing!) or my personal guilty pleasure, The Big Bang Theory.
OK, I’m just rambling now, but when one has been doing this for six weeks, perhaps she can be forgiven.
