Ingredients for Making the World Anew

I know how to do isolation:  I’ve been a hermit for seven years, for the most part cutting myself of from intimate relationships, close friendships, and social activities.  This time, though, when the world joined me in isolating itself, my external distractions were also cut off. In the past, I daily left home to talk to people at the YMCA, where I spin, or chat with clerks at shops around town. Life outside was vibrant and noisy and kept me distracted, the thing I most love and hate in equal measure.

I learned how to be distracted in childhood from violent parents who kept the drama going all that time; that is until I left home to elope to Biloxi, Mississippi. Then marriage, children, divorce, and single motherhood kept me busy in their own demanding ways. It wasn’t’ until I moved to Portland, Maine, by myself, that I came face to face with the distractions that kept me from completing lifelong, passion projects, like writing a memoir, which I never rewrote, and a novel, which I’m plodding through because I still wrestle with being distracted by daily, long-winded, gossipy telephone chats with my sister, hours of internet surfing, and even more hours spent watching movies, activities I partake of after completing my work as an online instructor.

When the coronavirus ended the world yet again, Portland, Maine returned to its silent, dark, and apocalyptic nature. When I first moved here, I resented Portland’s end-of-world vibe, how its homeless shuffled down the street as if there was nothing else to do, and how its other citizens were distant and dreamy in their expressions as if they knew that only at the end of the world could they start anew. Silence, solitude, and a sprinkling of a few necessary ingredients (listed below) were needed to start fresh, anytime and anywhere. And Portland knew best how to redo and rebuild after the city burned down several times, a resilience now symbolized on its flag by a rising phoenix.

For a while gentrification and big city plans rattled the town with its promise of progress and modernity. New sophisticated people brought higher rents, noise, and busyness.  When the virus took hold, though, Portland returned to its old nature, and surprisingly, I joined in the ranks of those who paid reverence to simultaneous beginnings and endings.  And while shuffling and acknowledging the new norms of social distancing, I appreciated, for the first time ever, the knowingness of who I was and what I must do, regardless, a wisdom earned from years of solitude and searching within. The mantra, “know myself and do it anyway,” even when distraction and drama called, even when I didn’t want to, rang on my lips.

And in my meditative, socially distant shuffle around town, I also gathered a few other ingredients to start the world anew:

Buses to move people forward

Utility and construction workers to repair and rebuild

Young couples who love anyway

Children who laugh anyway,

All who smile and dance regardless

Seagulls that soar

Squirrels that chase each other while leaping

Trees for oxygen and inspiration

Bays that meet up with the ocean

The Sun