As languages go, I don’t mind the language of numbers. I do, however, think we’ve fetishized numbers as some sort of be-all and end-all that is dangerously illusory. Despite the universal historical practice of myriad forms of numerology, numbers a.k.a. data, aren’t the bottom line. The numbers for coronavirus have been startlingly bleak, haven’t they? So imagine my delight when a member of my household read that “113,000 people have recovered from COVID-19.”
Read MoreMy homiletics professor said it on the first day of class. “Every sermon must find a common enemy. It doesn’t matter what it is: sin, death, taxes, sex, politics. For a sermon to be effective, you need an enemy.” A marketing guru I’ve recently unfollowed said the same really. “Find their pain—and poke it!” It’s certainly a theme in the historical rendering of the behavior of the United States during World War II. A meme for WWII: “We had a common enemy that made us come together.” The question I wish to ask today isn’t about our common enemy. A six year old could tell us it’s the coronavirus.
Read MoreAre you an EMT? Are you an ER nurse? Are you an infectious disease doctor? Are you an ambulance driver? Are you an anesthesiologist? Are you a respiratory therapist? Are you a retail pharmacist? Are you a hospital kitchen worker? I’m not any of those things. Few of us are. But I am a first responder, and so are you. Or, if you’re not, you ought to be.
Read MoreOscar Hammerstein II is one of my heroes. His characters Will Parker and Ado Annie sing a song in Oklahoma! with a lyric that goes “With me it's all er nuthin'.” Then he straight-up asks Ado Annie, “Is it all er nuthin' with you?” The Trump Pandemic seems to me to be asking the same question of each of us. It’s a Hokey-Pokey Pop Quiz. Are you putting your whole self in? I am.
Read MoreTranscendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson was known for claiming, “The first wealth is health.” Today I’m sure deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine Jessica Lustig agrees with him. In her article “What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick with Coronavirus,” she describes taking care of her beloved spouse as he is ravaged by COVID--19.
Read MoreIt’s time for True Confessions. I wrote recently that a friend had sent my husband and me two masks as we couldn’t get any here in the Hudson River Valley. When the envelope arrived, it looked a little the worse for wear. Despite the best efforts of the USPS, that happens sometimes. We opened it to eight blue latex gloves, and a number ten envelope that had one mask. Without so much as a breath, a thought, a reservation, I said, “Someone’s stolen one.”
Read MoreA frontline healthcare worker called me yesterday in high dudgeon, rip-roaring mad, ticked off, pissed, angry, mad as a wet hen. Mad mad mad mad mad. I can’t blame her. She’s a pharmacist in a major grocery store chain, and the management of the specific locale of her employment is wringing its metaphorical hands like a heroine in a melodrama about how to care for its employees. In short, they’re not. She has every right to be mad. That is, however, not why she called me.
Read MoreThe idea came to me from within, but then I saw this headline in The New York Times, and that gelled it. “Storm Expected to Bring Snow to the Northeast on Monday” Of course it is. It’s March, ducklings. We who live in the Northeast know that on any given day it can snow, rain, sleet, hail, or beam sunshine with added lilac crocuses for good measure. My hanging Mary Engelbreit calendar for this particular March, that is, March 2020, bears two words: “Brace Yourself!” The lovely Mary has drawn two people flying a kite. We are bracing ourselves for something different from kite-flying these days.
Read MoreTwo U. S. senators, privy to closed-door briefings, profited by selling off stock in industries that would be affected by the virus. One of them invested in a technology that allows people to work from home. As Mr. Leonhardt wrote, “They could have made a difference, but they made a profit.” Okay, that’s enough. That’s enough. We get it. The coronavirus will have an effect on the world economy; we’re already seeing it at home in the U.S. Okay. I am afraid, but I’m not. Every single client I have has either cancelled or postponed their appointment. No one knows what’s going to happen.
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So, just when we were pondering the best mechanism to make some of my books available for free during this time of fear, Smashwords came up with Authors Give Back and we jumped on it! Here are the URLs for three of my books absolutely free for the next month!
Read MoreTwo of the three persons in my household got up this morning having had no sleep. I don’t mean sleep lite either, I mean, none. Both of them had to go to work today. One of them was troubled by dreams. It happens. The other’s runaway train brain ruled the roost right before bed and, by following her own train of thought, she concluded her way into the utter collapse of healthcare—where she earns her livelihood. Ouch.
Read MoreIt was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Thank you, Charles Dickens. Could there be a better opening sentence to describe our current situation? Only this one a friend sent me from LitHub.com rewriting first sentences of great literature for social distancing. My favorite was, “FaceTime me, Ishmael.”
Read MoreThe fear that is leading our experience of reality at the moment is, you might be surprised to learn, a form of spiritual bypass. Startling, isn’t that? The Narcissist-in-Chief, the Denier-in-Chief, the Toddler-in-Chief, or whatever other nickname you choose, has taken the practice of rewriting history to its dark underbelly. The thing of it is, as any good metaphysician knows, if we don’t rewrite history, to borrow from philosopher George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
Read MoreThe latest buzzword by my lights is social-distancing. Honestly, it makes me laugh. The powers that be are recommending social-distancing as one of three strategies to slow the spread of the coronavirus at the same time as article after article in The New York Times laments that we are culturally in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness. Beloved, we’re already socially-distant. How many real friends do you have? My definition of a real friend is someone who, if I called them using my one phone call from a jail in Peru, would they move heaven and earth to get me out?
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There is, in old-time metaphysical circles, an analog technology—if you’ll forgive the oxymoron—known once upon a time as Denial and Affirmation. It’s a simple but slippery concept, especially now that denial has become part of our standard recovery lexicon in the West. Denial, as they say in AA, is not a river in Egypt. Nor is that what the founders of Christian Science, Unity, Religious Science, Science of Mind, or Divine Science meant. They meant to deny the appearance of something in favor of using one’s will to choose something better.
Read MoreIt has been said by many more authoritative persons than I that we live in an Information Age. I cannot dispute the claim. What I can and do dispute is that it’s valuable. Information is information. Facts. Figures. Data. Zeroes and Ones. Ho-hum. There for the taking. So? So the consistent error we make, at least in the West, is to behave as though information is knowledge.
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