Consolation in constellations

Searching for Here

I’m so overwhelmed with the ongoing horror show we’re living in right now, in Iowa, in the United States, and in the world. I try to focus on the macro world, and the micro. That means I spend a lot of time looking at the night sky. I’m tracking Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and the various spinning constellations. I know where the Dipper is at this time of year. I know where to find the North Star. Tomorrow we’ll be pushing the clock forward. Next weekend we’ll watch the moon’s full eclipse between the earth and the sun. I’d like to ride along, perhaps tucking myself into one of the moon’s craters, and clinging on for dear life.

It’s a good sign for my mental health that I’m thinking about the near future. It means I haven’t completely erased myself out of what’s to come.

I’m also thinking about the past. There’s hope in that space, too. I can think about a year ago, or a decade ago, or more, and still recognize myself and maybe understand the path I was on.

It helps that for the last five years I’ve been working on book-length memoir. It isn’t out yet, but it’ll be called Searching for Here: Mapping an Unfenced Life. I mention it now because it’s one part reflections on the past, and one part daily almanac. The day-to-day bit covers mostly the year 2020.

Here’s the entry from March 10, nearly one year ago today.

Covid-19 has appeared in three unfortunate people in Iowa. That was the news yesterday, and I'm selfishly happy that the three individuals in question live ninety miles from me and had traveled together on a cruise vacation in Egypt, someplace I'll likely never go. In my mind, that makes them completely separate from me. I've built a curtain in my consciousness that takes real events and translates them into the action of a stage play. That very same mind is capable of taking distant and impossible threats and turning them into circumstances I feel an immediate urge to flee.

Yeah, I know. Eerie, isn’t it. And amazing how scars heal and rend, heal and rend. And heal.