A COVID-19 Journal

By Margaret McKinnis, March 2020 – May 2020

Introduction: 3/8/2020 – 3/25/2020
I came to Ithaca from Culver, Indiana, a rural town in the northern part of the state. It’s home to
Indiana’s second largest natural lake, Lake Maxinkuckee, and most who have heard the name
associate it with the town’s international boarding school, Culver Academies. Culver is a small
town, with just about one of everything — one grocery store, one bank, one coffee shop, one
stoplight. And though I appreciated it for its simplicity and slowness, I knew eventually I wanted
to leave the Midwest, yet I couldn’t exactly say why at the time. There just seemed to be more
living out there, somewhere, and I wanted to immerse myself in it.

I remember the eleven-hour drive up to Ithaca for the first time. I just kept looking out the
window as the flat cornfields slowly fell outside the frame and in entered the varied landscape of
Upstate New York, with its rolling hills and healthy foliage. I wasn’t exactly sure how I would
manage to find my place here, but I sensed from the beginning it had many of the ingredients one
might need to shape that feeling we all so often search for, that feeling of home.

I didn’t quite know it back then, but Ithaca would come to be a significant witness, present for
numerous intellectual and self-discoveries. Transitions often collapse those conditions and
expectations that marry us to what feels fixed, and instead invite alternative possibilities into our
purview. In fact, my time at Ithaca College might be best described as an ongoing series of
encounters with formerly unfounded possibilities.

Throughout my time as an undergrad at IC, I pursued a degree in Writing, spending most of my

time in Smiddy Hall. That particular building on campus not only holds a myriad of memories
but also a number of good-hearted people, too. If I wasn’t tutoring in the Writing Center or
attending courses, such as Poetics or Women and Writing, I was up on the fourth floor with my
professors and fellow peers. The Writing Department was one of the places where that feeling of
home came to form. While students worked on assignments in the writing lounge, we were
occasionally joined by our professors, each one a character worthy of their own book. The
interactions that took place there went far beyond anything performative or stiff; instead, both
students and faculty created an environment where we were welcomed to be our most authentic
selves. And those moments generated the material to build trusted relationships — ones that
challenged and expanded my sense of self. Friends and professors were able to reflect back to me
versions of myself I had never fully understood, and it is perhaps through a more grounded
understanding of the self that we become capable of posing new questions and working for
deeper answers. It was in Smiddy that I would come to learn how to piece together my own
belief system, and even more: how to piece together my own life.

But I didn’t know that these ideas about living, my understanding about how to mobilize my own
ethical framework, would be tested in such a pronounced way before I had the chance to attend
Commencement and walk away with my diploma. COVID-19 has destabilized a reality I had
assumed possessed certain set conditions: which are perhaps like a fabric’s fine thread, woven
with such delicate hands there’s little reason to note the individual pieces until you come across a
snag that risks unraveling the whole thing. Within the past two weeks, I have received a series of
emails from Ithaca College administrators articulating the need to pause and reimagine the rest of
the semester due to this pandemic. Folded into those emails were numerous prompts to
recalibrate so much of how we were to conceptualize ourselves — as students, family members,
friends, and citizens — and our place within this moment. When I read President Collado’s
emails — that we would not be returning to classes in April and that members of our own
campus community had come down with the virus — I found it difficult to fully register how the
implications of her words would map onto our everyday lives. There were too many details to
swallow.

But with the days starting to slow down, the minutes passing like hours and hours passing like
days, I am beginning to feel it. Perhaps a feeling all its own: a mixture of griefs and fears never
quite experienced by the body. We’re left at a loss for words.

Our graduation has been postponed until a tentative date in August. It’s funny how a few months
ago I was resistant to participating in the ceremony at all; the ritual felt performative and too
sentimental. I wasn’t really convinced that such a process could render much significance. But
perhaps it’s easier to poke fun at something when you assume it’s stable.

Commencement is a method for both solidifying closure and softening the aches that come from
goodbyes. The cap and gown, the diploma, the speech — somehow, these features all coalesce to
account for 4 years that you’ll never fully be able to articulate, at least not succinctly.
Commencement is like the souvenir you take with you; it isn’t really the object itself that you
care about, but everything it represents. With every day that passes, I become less confident
we’ll have one at all.

And I know my cohort is struggling with this. I see their anger and fear underneath their tongue
in cheek social media posts and petitions for changes to be made by the administration, such as
making our courses Pass/Fail. I can’t say I completely blame the students; there’s so much
uncertainty, and I think everyone’s looking for a face to attach their fears to. But such responses,
to me, seem only to interact with symptoms of something that operates at a much greater scale.
This pandemic is creating loss on multiple levels, decomposing numerous ways of being and
seeing. I suspect students’ frustration with our administration is born from the desire for
tangibles in a situation where so much has become untouchable. There’s hardly anything we can
hold; sometimes not even each other.

I keep puzzling over how we didn’t foresee this as a well-formed possibility. Some days I
wonder if anticipating these disruptions would have made this reality a little easier to grapple
with. Maybe then I would have said an extra goodbye, or looked my friend in the eye before she
went; maybe I would have stopped by my professor’s office hours one more time; maybe I
would have paused for a few more moments to take a full survey of Smiddy Hall, passing
through those classrooms where I spent so many days sharpening my thinking and building
relationships with professors and friends. I have found over the past few weeks it’s been all too
easy to venture down these paths of counterfactual thinking — where I imagine how things could
have been different through “if, then” constructions. Perhaps these narratives even offer the
means for buffering what’s hard to confront: a reality I can’t predict or understand no matter how
many headlines or emails I read. Right now, all I can do is live it.

Sunday, March 29, 2020

Students made it through one full cycle of classes online. Though each class has been adapted a
little differently (some are asynchronous, some meet in real-time, virtually via Zoom, and some
are a mixture), I found that any surviving piece of normalcy has been a gift. 

Returning to classes reminds me of a common “truism” in writing workshops — “form enables

content.” Professors would often couple this saying with prompts that had significant conditions:
“write a poem with only one-syllable words” or “write a paragraph of prose with the words:
green, moon, dust, and cake in it.” These structures facilitated our thinking. We were no longer
asked to take on the unruly qualities of blank white space, at least not alone. The goal of such
prompts was never to create a seamless, cohesive text. Oftentimes, most would produce
something clunky and disjointed, but enmeshed in the chaos might be one line or phrase you
save, a connection you might never have encountered without such limits.

Online classes mirror this process. Both professors and students have been handed a strange set
of restrictions, pushing us to adjust our expectations. I have heard some students question, What
could possibly be the point of continuing classes when the world is so uncertain? In my more
cynical moments, I have come across this question myself, and I know there are so many factors
competing for our attention: it’s difficult to simply be college students. However, there still
remain opportunities: connections to be made, understandings to be had. It may take more work
to find them, but building a structure, composing some kind of new rhythm, feels essential.
Disrupting the loud and ongoing uncertainty might be one of the best antidotes we have.

“Form enables content” serves as one analogy that alludes to the ways our sense of living often
comes from the schedules, rituals, patterns that we use to measure our lives. And I believe, now
more than ever, I need to know I am living: that I am accountable to lives beyond my own. 
Sunday, March 29, 2020 (Cont.)
Like many these days, I find myself taking walks to pass time. Moving the body has been one
way to remind myself that yes, I am living. I think I take more notice: the subtle pauses between
the birdsongs, the slow emergence of green on trees and bushes, the shifting moods of the water,
the shoe imprints left in the mud — I wonder how many have walked this path alone. 

Georgia O'Keeffe once said, “Nobody sees a flower - really - it is so small it takes time - we
haven’t time - and to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” I read this about a year
ago, and I felt it really captured the way life’s tempo rarely gives way for seeing much beyond
outlines and figures. It’s hard to let the significance of smallness truly come to form. But over
the past few weeks, adhering to the lifestyle of quarantine, I return to her words, reflecting on
just how small my world is capable of becoming. And it was, after all, this novel coronavirus,
which exists beyond the eye’s perception, that has altered our relationship to time and sight,
where we wonder, what world are we living in?

I can’t quite figure out the pacing. There’s no set measure to the days. I sense time has slowed
down to a microscopic degree, the kind of time you knew when you were six years old and
didn’t keep track of seconds or hours, just memories that felt detailed, full. But in the very same
day, I come up against a time that runs all too fast. It’s in those encounters with loss, where I
remember how the possibility of mortality is so intricately entangled inside of this moment, that I
feel the tempo quicken. There’s nothing I can do to stop it.

This is what I kept thinking while walking behind an elderly woman on her way back from
Aldi’s. I had just made my way through the empty Farmer’s Market when I saw her at the
crosswalk. She had a backpack on and was carrying grocery bags in each hand, one which was
full of paper towels. She walked slowly. She seemed to be gripping the bags tightly, occasionally
stopping to readjust her hands. Maybe it was because of the way she was walking, maybe it was
because of her older age, maybe it was because all of these details felt heightened by the reality
of COVID-19 — all I know is I was worried she wouldn’t make it home. I just kept thinking how
in another world, I would offer to help her carry the bags home. How was it that my body could
put hers at risk? Or perhaps even vice versa? Our trust in one another has been destabilized, and
this situation has asked me to reimagine what moral action looks like. It’s counterintuitive to
think you’re helping someone by staying at least six feet away, and yet it’s true.

It’s possible I wasn’t giving this woman enough credit. Maybe she’s more fit than I. Maybe she
liked the walk to the grocery store. Maybe she’s not really alone but has friends and family
checking in. And maybe she would have refused my help if I had offered in this other world I so
desperately wanted to enter into, the one where we could be there for one another, extend a hand
when the moment asks for it. I will never know, but I hope she stays safe.
Thursday, April 2, 2020
I’ve stopped wearing my watch. I am learning to find new measurements for scaling time. It goes
beyond the hands of a clock. These days I find myself dividing the day by interactions: where I
share “live” time with others. Many of my classes have been adapted into an asynchronous
format, so I now do much of my work independently. Where I was once accountable not only to
my professor but to my classmates for doing my readings and written works, I am now only
responsible for attachments in an email. So, I am beginning to savor those moments where I get
to interact with people in real-time, where the interplay of thought feels alive and moving.
Whether it’s hosting a Writing Center appointment, attending one of my live Zoom classes, or
checking in with friends and family — I let these moments dictate the ways my day unfolds. My
to-do list will always be there, but my time spent with others is not predictable in the ways it
once was. 

Today I spent three hours talking to a friend on the phone. But three hours hardly describes what
the phone call meant, especially in this moment of social distancing. The human voice is the
closest thing we have to the intimacy of sharing space with another person. Her thoughts and her
laughter made the day feel like something more than it would have had I lived it on my own. I
suppose, in some ways, we have always assigned meaning to our days through our engagement
with other people. But for me, these disruptions to my solitary existence take on a new
significance during this pandemic. I remember I am a friend, a daughter, a sister, a student; I
remember I am not alone. 
Monday, April 6, 2020
With the new CDC report suggesting that we all wear masks, I have made a habit of
wearing one on my daily walks. It feels like the least I can do. 
It’s all too easy to feel like our choices are ineffective or irrelevant, especially now, when
most of our interactions occur virtually. Sometimes, when I read the news and look over charts
that document the curves, it feels beyond me. And yet, every choice I make is in direct
relationship to the numbers. Keeping that sensibility alive feels essential to acting responsibly.
The pandemic has certainly emphasized our interdependence, illuminating its dimensions like
never before. It's terrifying and beautiful and heartbreaking and life-giving, all at once. 
It's a rudimentary process. We come to learn it, breath by breath. And quite frankly, I’m
not so sure I’ve ever been this aware of my own breath. When I wear my mask, my experience of
breathing feels all the more intimate, and I start to think about what the air holds. We’re trying to
contain what we can't see. It’s prompted me to think about the space I take up and how this space
might implicate others, how my actions affect those in ways that aren’t entirely calculable but
have resonance, nonetheless. 
Wearing my mask has also encouraged me to reflect on how we read one another’s
bodies. Our faces are important tools for communication. They facilitate interactions in ways I
had never thought to measure. With my nose and mouth covered, I can no longer offer a full
smile, so I rely on my eyes to signal to those passing by that I’m still a neighbor in these strange
times. It’s tempting to look down, to pretend you’re alone. I think this on days when I am most
afraid. But I think one of the most important things we can do, from six feet away, is give a nod
and kind gaze, if only to say: I see you.
Tuesday, April 7, 2020
I find that it’s easier to project these days. When I go for walks outside, every feature of
the landscape seems to possess potential: I’m looking to find meaning, a sign that alludes to
some kind of process where it all works out. 
I came across these stones the other day, one stacked on top of the other, and I felt
compelled to document it. I just kept thinking about what it means to build and balance a
structure and how our moment seems to require this process. I wonder how long it took for the
makers to lay the stones. I wonder how many times the stack fell. I think it must’ve taken
patience and some amount of humility to see the project through. But still it stands. 

And it wasn’t but a moment after that I began to observe this tree’s relationship to the water.
Though it has fallen, though it has divorced itself from its original composition, not all is lost. It
finds new interaction with the water, a force it hadn’t formerly contended with, at least not
directly. It’s a new way of being. And if you look at the entire image, you can see a cross
between the fallen tree and the one that still stands. It’s an intersection between normalcy and
change. And maybe that’s precisely the point. I don’t know what this intersection will mean to us
once we’ve lived through it, but for now, I’ll find comfort from the trees.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
I think I would be lying if I said I don’t encounter days where I feel terrified. It’s the kind
of fear that petrifies thought: the silence is loud, the stillness is felt. I wonder how and where to
move. What is this holding pattern I am stuck inside of?
    The feeling comes and goes at intermittent frequencies, and I wonder how to break it down
into its constituent parts. The pandemic has created a universal experience, though universality is
a pretty shallow term. It sheds little light on the particulars: how this common experience then
maps on to our individual lives. Universality does not then become some kind of equalizer. In
fact, COVID-19 has only exposed the many deficits in our institutions, which have been notably
influenced by xenophobia, racism, classicism, and sexism, that privilege some lives over others. 
Today, in particular, I am wondering how to hold both the collective and individual griefs
that have woven their way in and out of my day to day living. As a 2020 college graduate, I
worry about entering a job market that’s already collapsed; opportunities are scarce, and I
wonder how I will support myself.  As a daughter, I worry about my family members,
particularly my father who has cancer and is proceeding with chemotherapy. As a friend, I worry
about my peers who feel stuck and uncertain, who mourn the loss of the unlived experiences they
had imagined but never felt. As a citizen, I worry about our healthcare workers and those who
were already struggling to make ends meet. I worry about the president who has more regard for
his ego than he does for those risking their lives to save the many innocent people affected by
COVID-19. And there’s so much more fear that won’t make it on to this page —  fear that I’m
forgetting, fear that I may come into as more time has passed, and fear that can make no exit
from the body because it’s beyond the scope of language.
I write this because it’s real, unkempt and felt. It’s hard to welcome such difficulty into
the frame. To look at it a little closer, to wonder. It’s hard to piece together any kind of
resolution. I think we have this impulse to outlive our griefs. But I’m not sure such feelings
should ever be neglected or displaced, for they give us insight into what we value, what’s
important to us. Perhaps griefs and fears are like the harmonies in music; they don’t drive the
melody, but they enhance it. The sound is all the richer for it. It gives the song a new kind of
texture; it’s almost as if we could hold it.
Wednesday, April 15, 2020
Today is the first day I felt able to write about the present again. It was the first time I felt ready
to confront this reality with words, for it’s one that only swells with complication. 

On Saturday morning, I received a call that my grammie had died of a stroke. While she lived a
full life, ninety-one years, and her dementia had already prompted us to grapple with the loss of
her full personhood, I couldn’t rid myself of the shock. No matter how well we might be able to
describe the tenuous nature of a body’s life cycle, no matter how well we can name the internal
biological processes that eventually age us out of commission, death never feels rational. A
goodbye as severe and permanent as this one never really feels just or comprehensible. 

We were a family who knew how to gather. It’s what we did best. I come from a big Irish
Catholic family: my grammie had six children, who then gave her twenty grandchildren, who
then gave her fifteen great-grandchildren. Our family get-togethers were always full; it’s hard for
me to describe the energy we created when we shared space with one another. But I can say that
some of my fondest childhood memories were spent at Thanksgiving, where the house was
consumed by a presence entirely its own — it was song and it was dance and it was laughter — it
was love. And I ask the reader for forgiveness if my words start to compose some kind of
shallow sentimentality. Grief makes it easy to fall back on abstractions, to venture away from the
concrete. 

I had never imagined it this way. I suppose it’s hard to ever really predict how the loss of
someone will impact you; however, I had always imagined that my family would come together
— that we would revisit old memories, sing her favorite songs, and grieve in one another’s arms.
It’s what we know how to do best. But with COVID-19 dictating a new reality, creating new
forms we must learn how to live inside of, I am not sure I know how to face the loss. There is no
ritual, no gathering. Like a Russian doll, there’s one loss hiding inside of another. And I can’t
seem to find the end of it. We live out our mourning alone. And though gathering virtually has its
rewards, it hardly suffices in a situation as tender as this. 

But let me transition away from the number of losses that seem to foil what’s of greater
significance. For now, I want to settle my attention on a beautiful life lived. My grammie, Teresa
Nowalk, was a remarkable woman. She knew the inside of love, the kind we are not always
brave enough to embrace. Whether it was her work in hospice or the humble care she
consistently offered to anyone nearby, she was persistent in staying present for loved ones no
matter how trying the circumstance. 

I can’t exactly be sure why, but I have a vivid memory of my grammie teaching me how to play
solitaire when I was about ten or so. The rest of my family went out for a sporting event that day,
and I can remember feeling incredibly special to have her undivided attention. One on one time
was a rarity in such a big family. Over the course of the afternoon, she taught me how to shuffle
the cards and make different maneuvers depending on the hand. I think back on this memory
now, and I wonder if this kept her going during the days she spent alone, after her children had
started lives of their own and her husband still refused to retire. She was truly so brave that way:
willing to face her interior, to live in moments of deep solitude. That day I learned a special kind
of patience and encountered a special kind of love — that of attention. 

I think that was a gift she was particularly skilled in giving – attention. Whenever we visited, I
always felt like she anticipated my need, asking if I had enough to eat or needed a glass of water.
She made me feel seen.

In the last few years of her life, though, her attention started to change. She could no longer
sustain it; due to her dementia, she was losing her memory. Conversations with her sounded
much different — full of patterns, she introduced a new rhythm to our lives. But still: I learned
so much from her. She challenged me to stay present; she committed me to moments, not
memory. I began to realize that heightened impermanence didn’t make our time together any
less.

I started to write her letters for that reason. She could relive a thought or feeling over and over
again. I really just wanted her to feel the same care she had so generously given. Shifts in the
conditions of our shared reality welcome us to adjust our best practices for love. But we find a
way to continue relating, nonetheless.

And so, maybe, she of all people taught me that we are never entirely lost to a circumstance.
There always remains a possibility to craft new ways of being, even if they resist formerly
prescribed rituals and sensibilities. Knowing this doesn’t alleviate the unique pain derived from
the strangest of situations. But knowing her lets me believe that I’ll find a way beyond it, that I’ll
find a way, still, to grieve and cherish her love. 
Thursday, April 16, 2020

I took a walk to clear my head. Movement helps me challenge that stiff sense, where it feels like
I’m stuck inside of a still life. It’s April and there’s snow on the trees. I’m not sure what to make
of it. On the one hand, I thought we had survived the symptoms of winter. But on the other, the
snow accents the trees quite beautifully. 

I think we are asked to have a fluid relationship with the weather. There’s little hope for control.
We know this. Just watch a leaf blow in the wind; it’s hard to ever fully predict where it might be
headed. And again, there’s something beautiful about the way the leaf interacts with the air. It
looks like a dance; I don’t know the rhythm, and yet, it’s breathtaking if you are willing to
surrender your attention to it. 

I am thinking about the contradiction that lives here: between this desire for a grounded pattern
and the desire for awe. Can we have both? Well, there’s snow on the trees and it's April. Two
things can be true at the same time. We can lose and gain, grieve and heal. Again and again.
These processes are not exclusive but interdependent. I have to believe this is true, for I have no
control, no prediction, just attention. For now, I’ll let it be. 
Sunday, April 19, 2020

Just yesterday, I “attended” my grammie’s funeral via Zoom. I’m not sure I have the words to
describe it. This is new territory. It seemed there were numerous losses, layered one on top of
another: the loss of physical gathering, of touch, of ritual, of her. The experience was surreal. 

In some ways, I think it was harder to exist in that liminal state. We were neither here nor there:
we weren’t at the funeral but we weren’t not at the funeral. It was this unique space positioned
between the real and the artificial that was so unsettling. While I thank Zoom for the possibility
of simulating the experience, it felt all too dreamlike to register that it was in fact the last time I
would see her corporeal form in real time. 

I keep coming back to language, how our composition of words, metaphors, and allusions
doesn’t seem capable of describing these experiences. They are unlike anything else. But at the
same time, it feels like language is all I have. It reminds me of this Amy Hempel short story,
“Sing to It,” where in a dialogue between her two characters, readers confront how death is like
nothing else. Her characters resist the use of similes as one says goodbye to the other on his
deathbed. It starts, “At the end, he said, No metaphors! Nothing is like anything else.” But the
characters rely on them as the goodbye becomes more real. Throughout the story, they speak in
metaphors, and she responds, “So — at the end, I made my hands a hammock for him. / My arms
the tree.” We can’t help but find rest in images like this.

Hempel’s story gets its name from the Arab proverb: “When danger comes, sing to it.” And, in
my reading of the story, the metaphors imitate the sensations of song, buoying us amidst our
fears. I find great comfort in this mechanism: counteracting deep pain with the sensitivity of
language, its sounds and rhythms. We find a way to soothe what we can’t seem to outrun. Instead
we relate to it. 

I’m not sure I’ve found the words just yet. I feel like a photographer waiting for the image to
develop. It’s only then that you begin can describe the details that you see. However, on
Saturday, I did find great comfort from song. Each of my grammie’s twenty grandchildren
submitted a clip of them singing “Moon River,” which was her favorite song, and my cousin
composed them into something whole through video and editing. Despite distance and
unimaginable conditions, we found a way to come together — to sing to the loss.

If you’re interested, here’s the link:

[Link]
Tuesday, April 21, 2020

I don’t know where I’m going. I return to this thought often. Since the pandemic began to take
form, restructuring how we perform our daily lives, I have noticed how fragile our social scripts
are capable of becoming. In just about three weeks, I will end my time as an undergraduate and
attempt to transition into a new “chapter.” But it’s starting to feel like those outlined paths are no
longer accessible. The words we used to describe them have no resonance in this new world. I
wonder how to name the future. 

The other day, I was struck by the way the sun set over the trees. I looked ahead as the sun made
its own transition, letting the dark come in for a while, and I found the image to be quite
stunning. I don’t know where I’m going. But I know how to pay attention. 
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
When I’m at a loss for words, I turn to my favorite thinkers and writers. This week I returned to
the poet Mary Oliver more than once. Her writing has a simple quality about it. She never
overwhelms her images with excess or trivial decoration. Her poems conjure the feelings I can’t
seem to access on my own.

THE FOURTH SIGN OF THE ZODIAC (PART 3) by Mary Oliver

I know, you never intended to be in this world.

But you’re in it all the same.

So why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.

There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.

Bless the eyes and the listening ears.

Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.

Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.

Or not.

I am speaking from the fortunate platform

of many years,

none of which, I think, I ever wasted.

Do you need a prod?

Do you need a little darkness to get you going?

Let me be as urgent as a knife, then,

and remind you of Keats,

so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,

he had a lifetime.

She was writing under different conditions, but I think her wisdom carries over into this new
reality. We still belong to this world. We are equipped with sense; perhaps, we are just learning
how to use it differently. These human faculties are adaptable: we have the capacity to respond
to context, to attend to change with the same vigor we spend wishing for that past life. This
doesn’t mean I don’t yearn for the days before this pandemic, before our world was uprooted.
But more and more I think, maybe, there’s an opportunity to repurpose the past. Rebecca Solnit
has said that while we often look to the future for hope, we can also find it in the past. This
approach doesn’t mean things will ever be the same, but I think the past reveals those everlasting
human traits of courage and resilience that impart the means to engage with a future that has yet
to be named and understood. Let us use our time. Let us not waste it.  
Sunday, April 26, 2020

Most days, I walk by this body of water. I have found it to be a great comfort. Water
might be one of our most versatile metaphors, always receptive to our projections. Sometimes,
I’ll pause in front of it, hoping it might reveal the means for a story, a way to regulate feeling: the
solvent looking to disband, to find rest in another form. 

Sometimes the water moves as though it has somewhere else it needs to be, sometimes it
adopts a cadence as precise as a 4-beat measure, and other days it's completely still, assuming the
kind of quiet you aren’t sure how to relate to; you almost feel shame for watching a scene so
sacred. 

Sometimes I forget silence is its own sound, a sound rich with meaning: the attention we
learn how to distribute. 

Today, I couldn’t help but notice how the water reflected the trees. Two realities run
parallel to one another. Is one any less real than the other? I think it’s easy to discredit a
reflection as purely artificial, as something only tangential to our lived reality. But I look at this
photo and I see the trees’ portrait differently in the water. They render a new kind of depth: I
notice nuance in branches, the way they spread like fingers, as if there’s something they’re
reaching to grab. I’m not entirely sure what I’m getting at here. Maybe this is only a meditation
on another way to negotiate the tension that pushes you to pause. Maybe it’s that there’s more
than one way to conjecture meaning. It’s not always what we think. 
 I was recently reading the work of poet Mary Ruefle. In her book, My Private Property,
she has a section where she meditates on sadness, naming its granularity through associative
colors. Below are just a few lines that struck me as she composed a varied spectrum of
sadnesses, choregraphed by the concrete.

She writes that, “Blue sadness is sweetest cut into strips with scissors and then into little
pieces by a knife, it is the sadness of reverie and nostalgia: it may be, for example, the memory
of a happiness that is now only a memory.” 

She continues, “Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and eggplant, the stroke
of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for part of every year, words with too many meanings,
incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon.”

And, too, she identifies the sadness threaded into the everyday: “Gray sadness is the
sadness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum, ointments and
unguents and movie theaters.”

Then Ruefle also describes the sadness that conspires with the more visceral parts of
feeling: “Red sadness is the secret one. Red sadness never appears sad, it appears as Nijinsky
bolting across the stage in mid-air, it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration, and
courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside-down penny concealed beneath a tea cozy.” 

She continues with green, writing, “Green sadness is sadness dressed for graduation, it is
the sadness of June” and yellow, “the surprise sadness. It is the sadness of naps and eggs, swan’s
down, sachet powder and moist towelettes,” and pink, which is “the sadness of mushrooms born
with heads too big for their bodies, the sadness of having the soles come off your only pair of
shoes.” 

Reading over these lines reminded me of the power of impression: how it’s the subtleties,
not always registered as full moments, that shade our sensibility. If Ruefle’s detailed descriptions
of the colors of sadness render a depth, she also challenges her readers to remember the
importance of breadth, too. At the end, she writes, “In each of the color pieces, if you substitute
the word happiness for the word sadness, nothing changes.” 

And so, I remember again and again our perceptions are workable, like clay in a palm. Maybe
our attention depends on these paradoxes; they might be the only way we go on surviving this
tangle of losing and living.  
Thursday, April 30, 2020
It’s the last day of April. I don’t know where it went. The time seemed to pass the way it does
when you’re in the car, making the long trek back home after a visit to family members a few
states over. There’s something mundane about the highway, the roads and signs all start to look
the same; you feel like you’re stuck in between two realities, no longer a visitor and not quite at
home; the window becomes the best companion, meditative and hopeful. There’s more living to
be had, somewhere. 

As we transition to May, I keep coming back to hope. It’s not always easy to believe in these
days. But I was listening to the On Being podcast the other day with Rebecca Solnit; it was titled
“Falling Together,” and was recorded in 2016, yet her words possessed a vitality that expanded
my sense of hope and how to hold on to it, despite the cutting nature of rationality and reason.
She says, “Hope for me, just means a Buddhist sense of uncertainty, of coming to terms with the
fact that we don’t know what will happen and that there’s maybe room for us to intervene. And
that we have to let go of the certainty people seem to love more than hope.”

I think she’s right. I find myself often privileging my desire for certainty over my desire for
hope. And it’s all too easy to forget that hope is often preserved by our inability to make full
predictions. Hope rests in those sudden pivots and those abrupt transitions that never made it into
our premature calculations. I don’t think this means that we should rest into complacency,
waiting for miracles to appear; however, I do believe that we would do well to make space for a
sense of hope, grounded by criticality but still engaged with possibilities, known and unknown.

I wonder what May will bring.

Friday, May 1, 2020

We made it to May. There’s something quite refreshing about changing the calendar.
My calendar features Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun whose teachings have become a significant
touchstone for me over the last few years. I go to her when I’m not sure how to proceed and
brave the messiness of living. She always manages to cut through my despair and supply a
wisdom that’s both a challenge and a comfort. 

I thought this month’s quote had particular resonance: “The discomfort associated with
groundlessness, with the fundamental ambiguity of being human, comes from our attachment to
wanting things to be a certain way.” The groundlessness she cites has announced itself in a way I
have never encountered before, and amidst all these shifts, my attachment to particular realities
becomes all the more noticeable. Through her lines, I see the relationship between my desire and
discomfort emerge. Sometimes there’s a power that comes from simply naming it. 
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Tonight, I attended my last class for my Writing major. It was my senior seminar, Writing the
Other, and was taught by Eleanor Henderson, my advisor and one of my first professors at Ithaca
College. There’s something almost charming that I both ended and began my time at college in
Eleanor’s class; it wraps itself up how you might write the end of a poem in fourth grade. She
taught my freshman seminar what feels like all too many years ago, when it was hard to conceive
of any end to my time at college. I can remember feeling a comfort back then; it was a luxury to
know time was measured for you. As a student, you live inside a particular paradigm with its
own clock — a year divided by two semesters, divided by 15 credits of class, split by
intermittent breaks in between. For a while, you feel safe within the structure; you do not have to
think about what it will be like to take your own measure. 

But tonight, it hit me in ways I couldn’t fully register. I stared at the screen, took a survey of the
small boxes filled with my classmate’s faces: This was our last class together. How could it be? 

I keep coming back to the body and how we relate to experience through it. We’ve learned to
rely on the body to make meaning, and in that moment, so much of what we might use to
measure the experience of a “last time,” was out of reach, mediated by a computer screen. It was
strange to say the least. It felt more like an observation than an experience. 

This reminds me of an interview I was listening to the other day where the artist, Ann Hamilton,
described the learning done through the body as “embodied knowledge.”  I have been thinking
about how the artist models a particular kind of attention rooted in process: subtle adjustments,
creation and destruction working in tandem. And process and attention feel fundamental to this
moment.  

Hamilton reflected on how embodied knowledge entails process, which can be a great resource
when we don’t know how to name what it is we’re making: 

When you’re making something, you don’t know what it is for a really long time. So, you
have to kind of cultivate the space around you, where you can trust the thing that you
can’t name. And if you feel a little bit insecure, or somebody questions you, or you need
to know what it is, then what happens is you give that thing that you’re trying to listen to
away. And so, how do you kind of cultivate a space that allows you to dwell in that not
knowing, really? That is actually really smart, and can become really articulate? But, you
know, like the thread has to come out, and it comes out at its own pace.

It feels like within the many planes that govern my reality, there’s so much I cannot yet name.
And maybe this absence, this computer-mediated experience void of touch and tactile qualities,
will become a knowledge we can learn to integrate, like all the others. Hamilton reminds that it
takes time for such experiences to become “articulate,” and I take comfort in that. I will come to
develop new structures and find new time at my own pace to measure.
Wednesday May 7, 2020
Recently, I have felt like finding words that will satisfy the ongoing peculiarity has been a
greater challenge. I feel at the precipice of such a severe transition, and I can feel the fear
expanding as the days push on. I decided to take a different approach for reflecting and created a
collage from cut-up New Yorker magazines. There’s something gratifying about breaking down
paragraphs and sentences and composing new meaning from them. Perhaps it’s not unlike what’s
happening in a literal sense. The structures and institutions we built now encounter numerous
ruptures. And still, I hope we can find a way to achieve meaning. 

Here, I was thinking about what it feels like to live out time during COVID, and how it can be
quite lonely some days. I think it’s easier when we’re lonely to “time travel,” or visit our past or
future. That’s what I meant by the line, “I gather in my childhood.” It becomes easier to visit the
past, to rest in the moments that had more texture, yet now, so much of our experience is
strained, especially because many of us care deeply about doing no harm, about taking actions
(which are often inaction, like staying home) that could very well save a life.
Thursday, May 8, 2020

With finals week nearly upon us and “graduation” almost here, I decided to create a collage
relating to that transition and how it’s felt abrupt, like we’re moving on before we really got to
say our goodbye. I think there’s more to say here, but right now, this was a far as I could get the
composition. (The background is of IC’s Buttermilk Stadium.) 
In this collage, I was thinking about how COVID has asked us to relate to silence, and many of
us, sometimes by choice and sometimes by necessity, have resorted to life online. Near the end, I
was trying to convey how I often burrow myself inside of old memories that take on the more
felt and even idiosyncratic qualities of living.
In Closing — May 11, 2020

Today is my last day of class as a college undergraduate, and yet it feels so similar to the
past two months I have spent social distancing in my apartment alone. There are no signifiers to
suggest that this day demarcates the ending of such a formative epoch; perhaps, in some ways, it
ended two months ago. 
It’s hard not to begin calculating comparisons between how things are and how I thought
they might be. I had always imagined my last day with my professors and friends, savoring the
small subtleties — the ding of the elevator, the tricky lock on the door to the Writing Center, the
last class evaluations, my dear friend Thomas’ swift walk down the hallway of Smiddy for the
last time; he always walked ahead like he had somewhere else to be. I can imagine us laughing
our way down the stairs like we had just gotten away with something. In this other world, I
would cradle these impressions close to me, without having to expose my sentimentality. I have
always preferred to stow away such feelings. Yet, I feel compelled to put form to those
hypothetical moments, made out of the rich material of memory, for now it feels like the only
way to notate the intricacies of this loss. 
How is it that I can grieve a theoretical and unlived life?
I’m starting to wonder if I’m not grieving the rituals that come with a graduation as much
as I am grieving all the time in between; the precious yet obscure transitions between postures:
the moment between photographs, the experience that resists any framing. It's through these
incremental shifts, from one frame to the next, that we practice our goodbyes in an effort to
manage the depth of such a significant departure.
But this process was disrupted, reminding me that no imagined life has ever found its
form through predictions alone. I might compare it to the way I experience music. I have felt like
over the past four years, I was listening to a song with multiple key changes; the significance
builds and your body perceives and prepares in ways you can’t quite account for. But right
before the climax, someone ripped my headphones out. It’s silence and shock and sorrow, all in
one moment. 
It’s hard not to recognize that the loss of my last semester is, in a lot of ways, collateral
damage; this pandemic has upended lives and taken so many from us. And yet, I feel the
particularity of the hurt; I can’t divorce myself from it. It’s hard to know exactly how to name
and process this moment. I’m not sure how to make these remarkable and dissonant sounds
cohere into a tangible I understand. 
So, again I return to the artist. In May 2013, artist Teresita Fernandez gave the
commencement speech — “On Amnesia, Broken Pottery, and the Inside of a Form,” — at her
alma mater, Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts. Her insights, though
specific to the arts, render a prescient resonance.
Much of her speech grapples with duality, how meaning comes to us through
contradictory pairs. She describes her encounter with Greek ostracons, which were broken pieces
of pottery used for writing and often repurposed for voting. She says,

I was enamored with the idea of how what seemed broken, discarded, useless was
transformed into a meaningful gesture… We are conditioned to think that what is broken
is lost, or useless or a setback, and so when we set out with big ambitions we don’t
 necessarily recognize what the next graduation is supposed to look like. Unlearning
everything you learned in college is just an exercise in learning to recognize how the
fragments and small bits lead to something that is much more than the sum of its parts.

I find comfort in this sentiment, that we can continue to reimagine possibility, that a perforated
form might be the necessary condition for extending meaning beyond the threshold of any one
context. 
Fernandez continues reflecting on the potter’s craft, which models ways of repurposing
painful breaks in form:

In Japan there is a kind of reverence for the art of mending. In the context of the tea
ceremony there is no such thing as failure or success in the way we are accustomed to
using those words. A broken bowl would be valued precisely because of the exquisite
nature of how it was repaired, a distinctly Japanese tradition of kintsugi, meaning to “to
patch with gold”. Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the
repair and make it “good as new.” But the tea masters understood that by repairing the
broken bowl with the distinct beauty of radiant gold, they could create an alternative to
“good as new” and instead employ a “better than new” aesthetic. They understood that a
conspicuous, artful repair actually adds value. 

In this analogy, she highlights the necessity of fragmentation, that destruction is entangled with
creation, and furthermore, the importance of remembering. Memories — which trace the lines of
pain and joy, loss and love — become the gold we use to bind new meaning together, until it
finds stable form again. This loss welcomes a newfound wonder, and this wonder equips us with
the courage to pay attention, to risk a relationship with this messy world.
It’s hard to know exactly where I’m going. I will be leaving college with pieces fractured
before I had considered them whole, and I will be entering a splintered world with little certainty
to hold it. But I am also continuing on with gold — the capacity to attend to these fissures and
craft a new form that language has yet to name. I have to believe I will find the words.