“Nobody told me there’d be days like these
Strange days indeed
most peculiar
Mama…”

–  John Lennon

Some random thoughts from the front lines of this alternate universe we are living…

My life is in limbo, as is yours, and a giant shroud of uncertainty covers us all.

Everything is on hold until further notice.

I just finished my first week of teaching remotely without interacting in-person with my students and my colleagues. I miss their faces. I miss their smiles.

I never thought I’d see the day when my planner was empty.

I look at my calendar adorned with strike-outs and “canceled” stickers and wonder, when will the first social gathering happen that I will go to? When will until further notice end? Will it be in May? July? September? January 2021? Or beyond?

A more profound emptiness encircles us right now than the emptiness found on my measly planner pages… empty trains and busses, airports and parking lots, shelves and displays and freezer cases, playgrounds and basketball courts, classrooms and lunchrooms, stadiums and ballparks, arenas and aquariums, boardwalks and museums…

The biggest empty might be found inside our hearts and dreams.

Last week I wrote about hope, and while I’m clinging to hope the way a baby clings to its blankie, the daily shift further away from life-as-we-knew-it skews that hope just a little bit as it bends towards a new unknown.

I have underlying medical issues, and I am afraid.

Nobody deserves to die from this, yet we all know people who are going to die.

My heart is in denial and cannot accept that.

Nor can I wrap my heart around the fact that my five-year-old nephew figured out on his own that he wouldn’t be able to have his turtle birthday party next week. He’s bummed, but he’s okay with it. My heart, however, is not.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to be an Empath right now.

During my journalism lesson about 9-11, I tell my students that I’d love to bring them back to September 10, 2001 so they could experience the feeling of life before it was changed forever. I wonder, when I teach my future students about the history we are living right now, how drastically different our “yesterday” will be compared to the culture and society they will live in. How will their reality come about, and what will we collectively lose in the process?

Things will never get back to normal because normal no longer exists.

I’m off the news and listening to a lot of music. When I’m not teaching remotely or preparing lessons for remote learning, my words, my pen, and my keyboard keep me going.

So do the singing birds who wake me up every morning. I can’t hear singing birds in my classroom, but I can from my living room, and I’ve got season tickets with a front-row seat for their daily morning concerts.

Everything is blooming earlier than usual… the cherry trees, the forsythia, the weed flowers, the magnolias, the pear trees. Maybe the Earth knew we needed some color right now.

With a major announcement scheduled for less than an hour from now by our governor, I have no doubt that this post will be old news five minutes after I hit “publish,” but it’s a record of this moment: 11:15 AM on March 21, 2020.

We’re all human. We’re all concerned. We’re all connected. We’re all in this together. Much light and love to you and yours.

 Thanks for joining me on my journey. I’m glad you’re here.

With gratitude,

Jill

“Coronacation Chronicles – March 21, 2020” was posted on jillocone.com and on soulseaker.com on March 21, 2020. Views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the writer, who was not compensated in any way by any entity. Copyright 2020, Jill Ocone. All rights reserved. Contact jillocone@gmail.com with reposting, licensing, and publishing inquiries.