a temporary shift

It’s the second pandemic Palm Sunday.

Here in Kentucky, it’s raining.

I’m eating oatmeal and drinking coffee while wearing sweatpants but I likely will put on some version of real clothes today.

Yesterday, I took a walk up to Ashland. Two crows flew back and forth, criss-crossing in front of me. Two crows, I accept as a blessing.

My routines have come to a sudden halt as one week ago, my mother went out for a walk, fell, and broke both of her arms. My mother is my father’s caregiver, so now I am at their house to care for them both.

Today, I’ll go home and gather some art supplies so that I can’t paint while I’m here, and I’m sure I’ll get back to some sort of posting soon, but otherwise, I’m not sure when I’ll return to my routine as it was.

I haven’t been inside my parents’ house for a year, due to Covid, so in addition to acquiring, preparing, and serving food, and helping my mother tend to the things she can’t tend to due to her injury, I’m cleaning and taking care of small repairs and adjustments that need to be made, and trying to get the porch ready and everything in place for an outdoor Easter meal.

I’m going to make a lemon blueberry lavender cake.

I’m fielding phone calls and texts and receiving food prepared my many kind people.

And I’m sleeping in a bed that is not my bed.

It’s as if I’ve been plucked up out of my normal life and placed back down into something completely different.

I miss my routines. But I also know that every single time life does this, every time something traumatic or shocking happens, every time we are lifted up and put back down someplace else, the eventual result is a necessary and positive change.

So perhaps this is an opportunity for me to re-evaluate how I show up for all of my work and life itself.

At this moment, however, my days are mostly about making sure my parents have what they need.

It is also a full moon, which I have seen described as the moon of falling apart and coming together. I just joked with my mom that she’s been through the falling-apart. Now is the time of the coming together.

Perhaps that’s where I am as well, in my own way.

In all passages of falling apart there is an opportunity to rearrange the pieces during repair, to come out new.

It’s somehow appropriate that it’s Holy Week, the week of falling apart that leads to rebirth.

I love you.

Thank you for being here.

Onward we go.