You Are Here

In the early days of the Pandemic I wrote about the unwinding. Time seemed to have stopped, replaced by undoing, slowing the patterns of forward movement as one might loosen a skein of wool or unravel a weaving. A release of deep-seated patterns hurtling us forward towards the planet’s extinction. Simple things like, “I’ll drive here today,” or “I’ll fly to visit this person.” Now, if I drive my car once a week to the grocery store, it’s a lot. I don’t even consider flying, though I haven’t seen my family in months. When one of them asks, “When am I going to see you?” I look blankly into their face on the screen and say, “I don’t know.”

Driving to Taos on Thursday felt like a radical act. It took a good 20 minutes to adjust to being in the car, but once I did, the motion was intoxicating. Shifting lanes, slowing down through Pueblo land, climbing the pass with the Rio Grande to my left. I got a haircut and had lunch with a friend. Even with social distancing and masks, there was a rhythm to the day that felt almost normal. 

Normal: The semblance of things past, something familiar.

The winds blew up last night. Wild gusts coming out of the north where the fires are. I closed the doors and windows and slept with the fan on. In the morning, the smell of smoke was everywhere. I checked Facebook to see if my friend had posted. The fire was still far enough away that she and her partner hadn’t evacuated, but the winds had been dry, hot and intense.

When I imagined unwinding, I wasn’t thinking of 560 fires in California or 100,000 people evacuated from their homes. I wasn’t thinking of hundreds of thousands of deaths from the coronavirus or sorting machines systematically removed from postal facilities. I read in the news this morning that there’s a rare weather event building in the Gulf of New Mexico. Two tropical depressions that could become hurricanes. If they do, it will be the first time in history that the Gulf experiences two hurricanes at once. The town of Chauvin, Louisiana, is situated at the point where they are expected to overlap.

A doctor said an interesting thing to me once. We were discussing details of the aging process when she suggested a remedy. She relayed the statistics, degrees of efficacy and possible side effects. I asked if I could use the medication for just a short time and then stop. She paused for a moment and said, “Life moves in one direction.”

I’m experimenting this morning, moving my right hand clockwise in a circle and my left hand counter-clockwise, life’s forward movement and the unwinding. There’s an overlap where they meet, like a Venn Diagram. Chauvin, Louisiana. A place on a map with an arrow that says, “You are here.”