I would like to preface the following by expressing my deep grief and sorrow for those directly affected by Covid-19. Sadly, I do know some that have lost their lives. I also know of countless others that have been utterly destabilized by the crisis.
This morning, I wish to share some of what I’m learning about personal and spiritual liberation based on my experience living through this crisis as a parent and educator. If anything, this crisis has given me pause to reflect deeper on the meaning of life without the productivity hamster wheel I have felt trapped in most of my life. This crisis has caused me to let go of the myth of perfection. A side note: I could write an entire rant about Trump’s call for states to “LIBERATE” themselves, but that would defeat the purpose of my message. I encourage you all to seek areas where we can shrink and one day overcome polarization.
Over the past week, I’ve been reflecting on parenting and teaching during the pandemic through a lens of liberation. At face value, any parent or teacher might likely laugh in my face. Liberation? Ha! We have lived for over a month with ever-increasing constraints. With varying degrees of fear regarding normal everyday activities such as going to the grocery store. While quarantined in our homes with the same people 24/7 (even if it is our loved ones) nerves are bound to flare. One day a few weeks back, I had to explain to my daughter that we couldn’t go to the playground, even though the swings seemed to taunt us by swaying empty in the breeze. Though time is more abundant than ever, it seems as though I have not a moment to myself. I am a short order cook who also now does the laundry non-stop in between Zoom meetings and lesson planning. And how is my daughter making so much laundry anyway? When I finally sit down to create meaningful lesson plans or to work on professional development or to answer an email from my exploding inbox about whether or not an assignment should be double-spaced, I remember that the online learning platform my daughter is using for the day goes offline after school hours, or that I’m burning an omelette, or that I need to shower now or I will lose the opportunity. Though I made the choice to become a single parent and take full responsibility for my actions; the circumstances of the pandemic cause me-at times- to feel like I am in this alone. Much of the time, liberation seems an impossibility in my mind.
Can we seek liberation in a sense right here, right now? I know it is possible. It’s really hard work. It requires making space, striving towards diligent practice, and deep reflection to slowly shift our perspective. Something I’ve learned throughout this crisis is that to achieve a sense of liberation is to accept that none of us know what is going to happen. And while this is scary and unsettling; this uncertainty is a fact of life. This uncertainty was among us before the pandemic and will remain forever after. Accepting that none of us know, connects us. We are in this together. Though I am isolated in my house with only my six year old daughter and a newly adopted dog; I am not alone. There is no perfect way of getting through this because this pandemic and our current way of life is unprecedented. I’m finding that I have choices to make every day and one pivotal choice is to discard the idea that I can be a perfect parent or teacher.
What I know is that I don’t know. I think achieving a sense of liberation throughout this crisis also requires all of us to foster a beginner’s mind. As Suzuki Roshi said, “A beginner’s mind is wide open and questioning. An expert’s mind is closed.” Moving forward we need our minds wide open and questioning. I don’t know about you, but I don’t wish to return to the way things were five months ago. I feel strongly that we need to move away from polarization, first in our personal lives. Through this brokenness, I think we have the opportunity to create a wholeness that could have not been created otherwise. I have already witnessed the greatness of humanity with people rising to the occasion to help one another through this crisis. In her book, Welcoming the Unwelcome, Pema Chodron introduces a chapter on “Overcoming Polarization,” with the following:
The time we live in is a fertile ground for training in being open-minded and open-hearted. If we can learn to hold this falling apart-ness without polarizing and without becoming fundamentalist, then whatever we do today will have a positive effect on the future.”
I’ll admit; when Governor DeWine announced the first round of school closings on March 12, I was both relieved and freaking out. Relieved because I could stay home and enjoy an abundance of time with my daughter. Freaking out because I had no idea how to continue teaching my high school students from home. We had made so much progress in working with minimizing polarization and practicing civil dialogue. With the fact that over half of my students lack a strong internet connection; I felt that all these gains would be lost.
First to address my freak out about perfection. Like many parents, I feel the pressure (mostly internal) to be the perfect parent. During the initial week of school closures, I saw this handy color coded time schedule floating around social media. Some of you may have seen it; it was titled “COVID-19 Daily Schedule.” Kudos to anyone out there who is making this schedule happen. The schedule magically streamlined the day into 1 to 2 hour increments for activities such as, “WAKE UP” which is any time before 9; Morning Walk (yoga, if raining); Academic Time; Creative Time; Lunch (only 30 minutes!!!!); Chore time (also only 30 minutes!!); Quiet Time; More Academic Time; Afternoon Fresh Air; Dinner; Free TV time; and finally Bedtime. Ok. This schedule genuinely seems like a great idea and children do thrive on routine. But honestly, this schedule awakened my deepest fears of inadequacy and imperfection. I spent hours and days back on the hamster wheel. I felt like all of my actions were a failure.
Still, I soldiered on. I tried a version of this schedule for exactly 2 days. And then the wheels came off. Shortly into “Academic Time,” on the third day, my daughter hit a wall and I could sense that she was anxious and unsettled. Then I realized that I was anxious and unsettled because I wasn’t following the COVID-19 Daily Schedule to a tee and as a result was probably going to be voted worst parent of the year because my cousin was doing this with her kids AND found time to post her smiling and cooperative children posed at makeshift desks in front of a whiteboard with the COVID-19 Daily Schedule blazing colorfully in the background. Then, as I was trying to plot out my next move, since the schedule was turning into a disaster, my daughter looked at me with a fierce grimace and screamed at the top of her lungs that I was, “the worst mom ever,” and stormed off to her room. Moments later her small arm reached out to tape a “Keep Out,” sign on her bedroom door. At this moment, I felt like the ultimate failure. I wept openly for a few moments and then somehow remembered a passage from a Sharon Salzberg book. In the passage, she is talking about the process of metta (lovingkindness). She states, “I have thought of this practice as being rather like holding in my hand a fragile, precious object made of glass. If I were to grasp it too tightly, it would shatter and break. If I were to get lazy and negligent, it would fall from my hand and break. Connect to that object gently, with awareness. In just that way you can connect to, or cherish, each metta phase.”
Rather than the metta phase, I imagined my daughter as this precious object and realized that by clinging so tightly to this COVID-19 Daily Schedule, I was causing her to break. I was modeling an unhealthy coping mechanism which says that when we are experiencing uncertainty or loss that we should get on the hamster wheel and plow right through it with productivity. The last thing my child or any child, including my students, need right now is this unnecessary pressure. They have so much to carry with them. What they need from us is empathy and compassion. What they need for us is to make space for them, as Salsberg says, “to connect gently, with awareness.”
Before I close, I want to speak briefly about my mention of overcoming polarization. As an educator, working with the teenage population; my days are rife with polarization. Developmentally, many of my students are stuck in “big ego” and can only see through this lens of us and them. Prior to the school closure, I was at the end of my rope with this mentality. The students could sense this and were egging me on by leaving me notes about Trump 2020 and writing essays in which they wanted to debate the merits of Trump’s presidency, minus credible sources and logical reasoning. Some mimicked our President and called coronavirus a hoax brought on by the libtards. This blinding ignorance drove me nearly mad. But I ask myself how valuable am I as a human, a parent, a teacher, if I cling to these polarizing thoughts and ideas?
Through a strong meditation practice and much personal reflection, I strive to know my students beyond this artificial lens. I strive to see them as the divine spirits that they are. Though I cannot change the societal and political structure overnight, this decade or perhaps even in my lifetime; I can make choices that do make a positive impact.
I share my story with you to encourage you to see beyond an all or nothing approach to living through this crisis. I share my story with you to offer you active hope. I share my story with you to remind you that we are all flawed and imperfect, yet within us all is the spark of the divine. All of this makes us human and interconnected.
“Let everything happen to you/Beauty and terror/Just keep going/No feeling is final.” Rainer Maria Rilke
Homily – Kelsey Myers
In some ways, we have never lived through anything like this ever before. In other ways, we have been here before, we have done this before, we have felt the weight of history on our backs – because this is a historic moment, this is a moment that will redefine and shape the course of our lives. And sometimes it is useful to play the historian, to compare and contrast the other major historical events – times when we have been forced into hiding, forced into our homes; times where we have felt moments of pure and unadulterated panic and fear; times where we felt the obstacles we faced were insurmountable, and faced them anyway.
I am reminded of Exodus. As soon as I knew the theme for this month was liberation, I thought of Exodus, that story of slavery and liberation from bondage, one of the ancient ones, one for the ages. I have always been particularly drawn to the story of Moses, and as Jewish people around the country gathered together for virtual Seders this recent Passover, I was reminded of a pivotal moment in the story, during the last plague.
Exodus 12:22-23 dictates Moses’s instructions to the Israelites: “Take a bunch of hyssop, dip it into the blood in the basin and put some of the blood on the top and on both sides of the doorframe. None of you shall go out of the door of your house until morning. When the Lord goes through the land to strike down the Egyptians, he will see the blood on the top and sides of the doorframe and will pass over that doorway, and he will not permit the destroyer to enter your houses and strike you down.”
The Bible is not full of literary flourishes. There is not a lot of room within these verses for introspection: as a work of literature, I have always found it lacking in this way; I have always wanted to go beyond the story and to the characters underneath it, to understand how they felt about the miracles and turmoils happening around them. Exodus does not tell us how these families felt, huddling in their homes as a great plague swept around them.
But we can imagine. The Lord, through Moses, promised that no one who followed His instructions would be struck down, but can’t you just imagine that people wondered? How afraid they must have been, gathered around their kitchen table, knowing that something great in the old sense – great in the way that God is great, not good but magnificent and mighty – was happening just outside their door?
I think of Anne Frank, sequestered in an attic. I think of friends on Facebook, one of whom is growing strawberries and texting me with updates every so often about the planting and growing process. How we cling to the nature outside our doors and windows, and how fortunate we are to still be able to indulge in that nature – to take a trip to the park, even if we have to keep six feet of distance away from everyone else.
We have been here before, we have been here again, and yet we have never been anywhere like this before, and we hope, for the sake of our children and our children’s children, that we will never be anywhere like this again. When I think of liberation, I think of two kinds – personal, and political. When I think of liberation in the time of corona, I think of rent strikes, and Amazon warehouse workers not being allowed to take sick leave. I think of essential workers in grocery stores not being paid a living wage, and how we must not allow ourselves to go back to the way things were before. And I think, at the same time, how we long for a sense of normalcy, anything “normal” we can cling to, even those of us who reject a sense of “normal” in favor of something revolutionary.
I saw a meme recently on Facebook. It said, “when I said I wanted to live through something historical, this wasn’t what I meant. It was supposed to be space travel!” It was supposed to be rocket ships and flying cars. The revolution of tomorrow always seems exciting and new but we are faced with the banality and blandness of our day to day. The truth? Our day to day is hard, and many of us are barely functioning.
When I think of liberation, I think of two kinds – personal, and political. We live in changing times, and I think one of the most powerful things we can do for ourselves right now is to indulge in a little self-care. It’s an old and ancient curse: “may you live in interesting times.” We have no shortage of those right now, and I know we’re all longing for things to just seem a little more normal. Maybe things will never be normal again. There are things we just don’t know. There are things we just can’t know.
In this time, let us remember the beauty of nature, and the beauty of our relationships with each other. We have never faced anything like this before, but we have faced the unknown before, and we have survived. Let us thrive in community, not wilt in silence.
