We’ll call it chapter three. To start at the beginning could otherwise be slightly overwhelming. Now we can look to the tambourines and operas from balconies, the pop-up lounge room concerts, the strength in solidarity. We can look to the softness and gentle gazes, move on from the toilet paper hoarders and skip quietly past the gun-wielding cowboys, stockpiling for an apocalypse.
We can look in. We can breathe in. We can smile. Or at least try our very best.
I’m sipping a classic lager: Otherside Social. She’s a local brew, that’s why I chose her, not necessarily for the epic irony that now screeches from her label. When we get to the other side, will we again be social? From a distance, maybe. Bette Midler style.
They say even the pontificators have paused. The intellectuals are gasping. The poets are frozen. They say the baby boomers are disobedient, the adult children are scolding. They say.
My Russian friend tells me humans are too stupid for democracy. She tells me Australia should have called Putin during the bushfires, to push the clouds across the sky, to make it rain. She says in a Moscow winter, barely a snowflake touches the pavement before the bulldozers roll in, the salt grains are strewn. The city cannot and will not stop.
We’re learning now what it truly means to have freedom. And what it means when the freedoms of a democracy are stripped. The rebels amongst us are bucking. The rebel within me is swaying. But she is quiet. She is observing. And she’s listening more than she ever did.
There’s nothing quite like bunkering down in paradise to feel your station. To understand your privilege. To appreciate your bounty.
Inspiration comes in so many different packages, doesn’t she? Whether it’s a twilight sprinkle that plops over the creaking corrugated iron fence, or a cheeky baby lizard scurrying into the day’s first rays, we’re all finding our new place to call normal.
I won’t write Love in a Time of Coronavirus as a quest to pen the world’s next best-selling novel. I’ll write to let the itches subside. To let the twitches unfurl and glide. To share thoughts with pages and perhaps friends who, like me, find some solace in the curve of a word as it slides into position behind it’s grammatical compadre and nestles in deep before a comma, colon or stop.
There’s no better time to understand the depth and importance of love in all her guises. She’s a wild and unforgiving soul, a raw and unrelenting cougar, a ferocious and invigorating nectar. As she fills us up, she strips us bare. And this is exactly where we must dance. Waltz into the cicada-droning evening and cuddle her head on. She responds to honesty, to trust, to optimism. She thrives on vulnerability, encourages softness, shimmies at the sound of hope.
We can be angry, we can be confused, thirsty, uncertain and afraid. But let’s also be willing and open. Let’s be thrilled at the possibility of community, resilience and creativity. Let’s bang the tambourines louder, sing for the heroes of the new season and conjure up all the jitters we feel and turn them into kernels of light.
walt disney concert hall, los angeles : january 2020