CORONAVIRUS AND THE BOOMERANG

Spring has sprung in Berlin!  Although just yesterday we saw the first snowflakes of this winter season.  Except that would actually be the spring season, I guess.  Yes, spring officially arrived on March 21, so it’s spring for sure.  I’m easily confused these days.  Everything is so mixed up!!

So mixed up.  I look outside my window and I see Nature’s vernal rebirth.  The cherry trees are funnels of pink cotton candy.   

The chestnut tree in our courtyard is swollen with buds that will soon burst into pyramids of fragrant white blossoms. 

 

I awaken to birdsong.  I rejoice in their evensong.  The velveteen bees that grace our balcony have returned. 

The apple tree teases me with its tight lipstick-pink buds that will transform into Eve’s temptation. 

 

The landscape outside is fresh.  New.  Exciting.  Full of promise.  Full of LIFE.  

At the same time, the landscape inside is morbid.  Worn-out.  Dull.  Unpromising.  Full of DESPAIR.  Inside, by which I mean inside my head, lives the Coronavirus landscape.  Strangely, in an inverted way, this landscape seems more threatening than the one outside.  Inside, the virus consumes my attention and threatens my equilibrium.  The non-stop information; the helpful guidelines; the shameful, shaming press briefings; the emails from the American Consulate, the CDC, the Bundesregierung, the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Atlantic that land in my inbox.  They mock and belie the spring landscape outside.

In my less overwhelmed moments I realize that these two landscapes compete for my attention and that I have agency.  I can choose within which landscape to dwell.  And in those moments of hard-earned clarity and calm, I remember that life and death coexist, naturally.  They always have and they always will.  That is the life cycle, the natural course of things.  That is the simultaneity of existence and non-existence in which we live and with which we are compelled to reckon.

 

That inevitable cyclic rhythm caught me up in its tumbling churn once and spit me out in a single day.  July 13, 1998.  Over the course of fewer than 24 hours, I witnessed first death and then birth.  Early in the morning of that day, I was present at the hospital bedside of a friend when he passed from this earth, and later that same day in the maternity ward when a friend brought her newborn into this world.  From death to life, all in the space of one memorable day.    

 

It all felt very mixed up.  I felt very mixed up.  But it was such a vivid example of how things really are.  Beginnings and endings unfold together all around us all the time.  We just don’t always see them as happening together.  But in this remarkable, indelible time of the pandemic we cannot avoid that simultaneity, and I think we should not.    

This little strand of RNA is teaching us an essential existential lesson in more ways than one:   Life is a boomerang.  It’s always racing away from us but it always comes back.  The spring landscape outside my window proves beyond any doubt that life comes back.  I will turn my attention to it now and to the hyacinths on the balcony that give me respite from the landscape that is racing away inside my head.  

Keep it real!

Marilyn

P.S.  Thanks to our neighbor H. for the Corona photo!