Unmasked

A little after 3:20pm ET on Saturday, May 30, United States astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley rocketed themselves away from our roiling planet, heading toward the International Space Station with an ETA of 10:29.m. ET, Sunday, May 31.

If I weren’t so claustrophobic, I’d envy them.

I woke up this morning before the sun did, with the kind of sick stomach feeling only anxiety can create. Peppermints and ginger, my usual go-to remedies when I feel like this, were useless, like tossing bricks into the Grand Canyon. I curled up under the blankets and waited for the first shreds of dawn to pull me into a walk through the fields and back to the woods where the mockingbirds and goldfinches were noisily commuting from one treetop to another, completely unaware that Nashville’s historic courthouse was set aflame last night. I put the tube of mints in the back pocket of my jeans just in case.

I realize every single word I write, every description in this post and others, comes from a comfortable seat of privilege. I have a safe place to take my fears, a job and health insurance and food in the fridge and cats I can afford to feed and a rich nurturing marriage with a really good and decent person. I have running water and soap to wash my hands each time I use the bathroom or handle raw chicken. I’m thriving on the other side of a few hardships that are the stuff of other people’s worst imaginings, and that others have experienced but didn’t survive. I know I have a lot more to learn, more than a handful of unexamined biases to unpack and heal, a much deeper level of humility to carve out within me. In this current written moment, with images of vehicles on fire and the pain on brothers’ and sisters’ faces (from point-blank mace and lifetimes of not being seen or heard at all) still indelible in my mind, I am praying desperately for this awareness to nudge me, or rocket me, beyond what I think I know into what I need to know. I am willing to be uncomfortable. I already am.

If I was the one who spoke the words “could things get any worse??” out loud a week ago, I deeply apologize.

A week ago, I was sewing face masks, wishing everyone would embrace the compassionate act of wearing one and reflecting on how an 8” x 4” piece of fabric covering half of our faces still had the ability to reveal so much about who we are as individuals trying to be community during a pandemic. Our shrouded mouths still speak volumes and our eyes now carry the additional weight of formerly full-faced messages conveying our character, our values, our fears and our longings. We’re new to most of this, the logistics and external mechanics, that is. We’re having to repeat ourselves across a 6’ space, talking through cotton and plexiglass to make a simple bank deposit or mail a letter. It’s awkward and we don’t like it. We want to be good at it in an instant, or better still, return to the days of unfettered access to conversations and the smiles of strangers. But that’s gone for now, and we’re grieving it across a continuum of grace and ferociousness, much like other losses in our lives.

Tomorrow, George Floyd will have been preventably and needlessly dead for a week. The good people of Minneapolis and Columbus and Philadelphia will walk past the bordered-up storefronts in their respective neighborhoods, crunching remnants of glass and livelihoods beneath their shoes and sandals. They’ll maintain their resolve to rebuild and restart their businesses and somehow keep moving forward into a pandemic that still hasn’t been contained or managed, and a justice paradigm still entrenched and intentionally skewed to favor only a few of us. Parents will struggle to find the words to explain to their eight-year-olds what’s going on. Some of us will venture out timidly to pick up milk and bananas, others will unknowingly infect the ones around them but remain asymptomatic. We’ll poke around in our broken routines for shards of the familiar, and try to mosaic them back together into something less familiar but workable, perhaps even slightly redemptive.

Back in March as COVID began to take up residence in our lungs and our psyches, I asked a few friends “who do you think we’ll be as a society when this is all over?”, but now, the question is “who are we becoming as all this continues?”, with the follow-up query “what is this showing us about who we’ve been all along?” insistently tagging along like all important questions do. There may not be precise answers to these but can we at least start the discussion in an attempt to find them, to land on a better path than the one we’re currently on?

Behind whatever mask we’re wearing, I know the face of love exists somewhere.

Please find it, dear fellow humans.

Please…