Diary 6/4/20

I have received a huge gift during this painful time in our country. I fervently asked for and was granted permission to go visit my daughter and her family in Lakewood, which is about a 45-minute drive from Kendal. I said that on my return, I would self-quarantine in my room for two weeks, and I shall. That part will be way less fun than what I am experiencing right now at my grandson’s home. He turned six months old on Tuesday and I arrived here Saturday evening, just before his bedtime. But my stay here has been worth any small sacrifice when I go back to my own home.

His reaction to my coming in and sitting down in his kitchen was priceless. He was in a front facing baby carrier on my daughter and then his dad walked in after bringing in my things. There I was, the first new person inside of Max’s house for many weeks. He knows my voice and face somewhat from our daily FaceTime connections. I always make a silly buzzing trumpet sound when I see his face on the screen. He was staring at me with his mouth wide open. I sounded my “trumpet” and he looked up at his mom, then over to his dad, then back at me and grinned. Then his mouth opened up again in a little round “O” of pure astonishment. He happily stood on my lap for a bit before fussing for his bedtime. It was a deep draught of joyful reconnection all around.

For another week or so, I happily live in a baby dominated household. Dad works from home as does mom when she can grab a few coherent moments, based largely on how much sleep she got the night before. I am up by the time I hear Max’s morning baby babbling and have mostly learned to sleep through any of his nighttime wake ups. The best part of being a grandma is that your grandchild is not your total responsibility (unless, of course, you are a main caretaker as well.) At this stage his schedule consists of two awake high-octane hours followed by naps of indeterminate lengths until his bedtime. Then we share an all adult dinner and evening lasting a few hours before I turn in.

Two weeks ago, I was asked to join Kendal’s New Normal Planning Committee as a representative for the Stephen’s Care Center. The SCC includes sixty-seven residents in the Assisted Living area, the rehabilitation area, and the Jameson House for residents with more advanced cognitive impairment. Our whole committee for all of Kendal also consists of new and old residents, and a variety of staff members. As the governor of Ohio opens up nursing homes, retirement communities, and businesses, we are given new opportunities to follow suit. Having had zero cases of infection on our campus of three hundred and forty or so residents, with hundreds of staff coming and going while working in all areas of running such an institution, that is a pretty remarkable testament to how quickly we took precautions to be safe. We want to remain safe as we open up to off campus visitors, using the pool, or safely making music together.

This committee has met by zoom twice a week since I joined and we have fielded hundreds of emails asking for information, clarification, and expressing great frustration from the community as old protocols are replaced, sometimes changing on a daily basis. And we are a community of deeply caring people. A quote from our daily newsletter distributed to all residents stated that today “approximately 100 residents and staff gathered six feet apart in a silent protest, standing quietly around… (our large circular driveway) for five minutes. More gathered near their workplaces. Some carried posters with phrases like “Racism Kills,” “Justice,”, and “Black and White: ONE United States.” They joined Kendal affiliates across the system, (in many states across the country) standing together in peace related to our shared values. As an organization, Kendal at Oberlin supports peace and unity for all.”

A day of gifts and protests.

With gratitude for David Benzing’s skillful gardening

Memorial Day at Kendal in Oberlin 5/25/20

I wrote to my PTSD warrior/medic brother

he reminded me to also think of thousands

of lost service men and women

I do

this hot and summery day

In the quarantined garden

of my nursing home

into the gazebo

when a sudden shower descends

Bumblebees bombed

by water-propelled gravity

shelter in place with me

ozone enriched

floral and dirt smell

dead pink azalea blossoms detach

glistening golden mushrooms of decay

snow white, fuchsia, and coral bushes remain

unfurling their glory

purple columbines stand at attention

beside tall bearded iris

fiery poppies bursting in air

The breeze picks up

percussive body slaps

puddles dumped as

canvas tarps snap over the terrace

the steady marching patter slows

wind chimes toll and toll

for thousands

and thousands beneath the ground

and thousands more civilians

who lost the viral war

Blue scraps above to the east

a persistent robin

silhouetted on the enclosing rooftop

summons an opening cloud to the west

bees return

softly ringing the flower bells

pollinating

breathing

stillness in

living and dying

By Judi Bachrach

For the Great Mother and the nurturing compassionate mother that dwells in us all.

A photo taken by Rebecca Cardozo on one of Kendal’s many ponds.

Diary 4/29/20

This poem arose in me during our last Quaker meeting.

The more

I hold myself together

The more

I forget I am already held

Let the pieces fall where they may

Here

I am

The following song was written and performed by my dear friend Jason and is offered as a gift of gratitude for those who struggle on our behalf. Please listen and help it reach those who need to hear and know that we are never alone.

Diary 4/22/20

As the writer Arundhati Roy observed in a beautiful essay (click on beautiful essay to read it) in The Financial Times last week, “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Diary 4/21/20

Headlines for The Fiftieth Earth Day

                                    Judi Bachrach

Canals Clearing in Venice!

Smog Lifting in Cities Around the World!

Seismic Activity on the Earth’s Upper Crust Quiet as Christmas Day!

If it were not a pause due

to tragically manhandling nature

we would be cheering at last

Help me to believe

fifty years from now

my grandson will congratulate

the successful generation before him

handing off the healing baton

to those coming up behind

Sustainable life on earth overcoming short term politics and financial gains!

All life thrives on our beloved planet!

Diary 4/13/20

A dear friend’s birthday today. I sent her an ecard– poor substitute for last year’s flight to New York and in person hugs and kisses and chatting with her friends and family– but so it is in these times. Love is boundless as we know, as is time, though that last bit is harder to believe. What we know on an everyday stage is that time flows from the past through the present into the future. Mostly, we spend a great deal of time going backwards or projecting forwards from where we are right now. To stay in the right now takes practice, and even after fifty years of meditation, I find it challenging to stay still in silence.

I am profoundly grateful  that sometimes Silence blissfully rises up as an almost impenetrable barrier to accessing the non- stop flow of brain processing. But every sit is a different one and sitting with open expectation is forever spacious and non-specific. Now I go to zoom my Buddhist meditation group. Today I just hit the potential of deep quiet when the hour was up.  So it goes. I heard the rain splattered against my window in this windy weather. So my thoughts splattered against that momentary ceiling of quiet. Passing and gone.

Thoughts “good” or “bad” slide on by. One thought I had was that all living things share the movement of oxygen and carbon dioxide in and out of their bodies. Whether it is in the air, within and on the land, or in the sea, this is true for ALL living things. The simple act of paying attention to every breath is our binding connection to life on earth. Breath itself is neutral, and the movement of that bodily exchange is going on sleeping or waking, for as long as we live. The last gasp is literally the end of our sojourn on the planet. Inside that thought I felt that I was being breathed, which is a familiar sensation/realization and always comforting to experience. To know that in this moment all I need to do is pay attention to each breath becomes such a refuge. I will make that phone call, read that article, connect with this or that person, eat my lunch- but not now. Now I am only focusing on that inbreath, that exhale, and the next and the next. Simple difficult work but with such rich rewards.

I wrote to another friend that anchoring in Love is what I work at every day. I am anchoring in my heart so that I am not drowned in statistics but can stay open to acknowledge the loss of the thousands of humans who have departed en masse from our world due to this virus. I felt seen and so moved by a poem sent to me by another friend doing the same work we all are while we safely find our groceries, cook, clean, use our computers, stay physically fit, and keep breathing every day.

Adrift 

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.

This is how the heart makes a duet of 

wonder and grief. The light spraying 

through the lace of the fern is as delicate 

as the fibers of memory forming their web 

around the knot in my throat. The breeze 

makes the birds move from branch to branch 

as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost 

in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh 

of the next stranger. In the very center, under 

it all, what we have that no one can take 

away and all that we’ve lost face each other. 

It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured 

by a holiness that exists inside everything. 

I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

—Mark Nepo

time for a little smiling:

Diary 4/7/20

I send two photos- one of me visiting with a Kendal resident (from the larger community beyond the Care Center) who took the photo from outside my window standing six feet away. The other is what a proud Daddy sheltering at home helped his 4 month-old son, my grandson Max, to do, what with having time on their hands….

Diary 4/5/20   

“The equanimity to face all of this cannot be rooted in denial. Rather, it must be rooted in an acknowledgement of how it all is. But to look head-on at the horrible beauty of the universe as is, without hiding behind fantasy or denial and selective perception, takes guts. To look Shiva in the eye, to acknowledge the violent as well as the gentle, the ugliness as well as the beauty, the greed and selfishness as well as the compassion and mercy, the sickness, death, and decay as well as health and life – and to all of it – ALL of IT – say “YES!” – that is the ground on which true equanimity rests.

“We protect our hearts because of the fear that they will break. Yes, they will break. But out of the pieces will be forged a new heart, a strong and fearless heart, a compassionate heart, a heart that is invulnerable. That is what is required. Nothing less!”

~ RAM DASS

I awoke to this quote my friend sent to me. Ram Dass was an early teacher for me way back in the 60’s and 70’s. As college students living in Boston, my husband and I were able to attend lectures by him, sing Kirtan with Krishna Dass, another devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, their guru, and always read all that he wrote. He remained an Elder and guide for many more years until his death last year.

The above quote touches me directly with the essence of what it is I ask my heart to do. How do I open to the sorrow of tragedy by death affecting thousands, and still hold to the conviction that this crisis presents an opportunity for change, for waking up to “horrible beauty “of the universe as it is?  Each of us probably has had a straight arrow aimed at the heart as this crisis continues.

Was it the story of the woman giving birth to her first child who cannot have her husband attend her in the hospital? Was it the death of a parent that could not be shared with their loved ones? Was it the loss of a home that a young family can no longer afford because they lost their non-essential jobs?

I was struck last night when my friend, who has lived in Italy for the past two years, sent me an email. She left Italy for a workshop she was going to lead in the States, just four days before they locked the country down. Fortunately, a client loaned her a summer home to stay in as, of course, the workshop was subsequently cancelled. My friend told me of photographs that a photographer from her village had taken, of army convoy trucks arriving in the small city of Bergamo to cart away the three hundred bodies of those who had perished in one day.

When I think of thousands dying all around the world, people get reduced to statistics in my mind. Three hundred souls I can imagine more easily- too easily. It would account for a majority of the residents in my current community of Kendal. I wept for Bergamo, for Italy, for America, Manhattan, my own county in Ohio and those three hundred deaths and countless stories of loss, multiplied over and over again. We are learning to say, Yes! to our broken hearts, making space for active compassion to take root. Laughter for what the soul has found is yet to arise for me today.