Every Good Morning

Have you noticed that some ungloved customers in supermarkets are making their hands into fists to push their carts or are wrapping their coats about the cart handles, anything to minimize their exposure to the virus they imagine may be present there? Or at the hint of sunshine, that paths and back roads grow thick with neighbors walking, happy to wave, many who ask how you are doing, even if […]

How do we sense danger when we can see nothing? We listen, eyes closed, head turning this way and that to bring the ears into their best position for taking in sound waves. We go still. We trust something we use less often — call it intuition, instinct, picking up a vibe, feeling watched, feeling set upon. The ‘reptile brain’ calls upon its automatic, unconscious awareness of danger and reacts […]

The outlying calm of most people is a happy occurrence but there are some shudders in the air too. Long lines at a local gun shop, a nasty argument I witnessed at a nearby grocery store over a bottle of wine and a driver’s license, the scapegoating of Chinese people as the ones to blame for this crisis (if this goes very badly, calling it the Chinese Virus has the […]

  Two days in since gym and work closings, since friends and family began to bunker up, and my body feels trapped inside itself, the energy churning and twitching out in irritability and an incapacity to go quiet, to reconcile with a prescribed stillness. My normal, acute restlessness is becoming more intense. What does one do with a body that creates more energy than can be used, that begins to […]