Effects of My Quarantine: Seeing Beauty Again

I will begin here. The sun is shining. I look out my office window, where the plumb tree is now in full bloom—its pink, west facing blossoms irradiated by the falling sun, and I listen to Rosamunde: Entr’acte No.3 in B-flat, not that I am sophisticated enough to know or even choose this piece, its just what is streaming on “Classical study music”. Yet, it seems perfect for the moment.

On my desk an incense candle burns, filling the room with the scent of lavender. A writing mantra stares at me— “No day without lines”, a mantra I rarely heed.

I am settling into what looks like several weeks of a quasi-self-quarantine in Puget Sound. The coronavirus is running through our region, and it is changing the way we live out here.

I had just returned from a week-long trip in the Midwest. I grabbed a cab, and from the driver discover my region is being transformed by this virus into a ghost town. “You are only my second fare for the day, after eleven hours!”, he said. “Today I can get to Pikes Place Market from the airport in less than fifteen minutes—usually a thirty to forty-five-minute drive. No one is out!”

Major companies are closing offices-allowing everyone to work from home. Meetings greater than ten are cancelled. Concerts, events, gatherings, all cancelled. Business travel is stopped. My church has cancelled all events but weekly Mass. How many ways can you say “Slow it all down”.

In a guilty sort of way, I welcome the change. I don’t want anyone to get sick or lose their livelihood or needed income— some of the expected impacts. But, to have the pace of life put to a screeching slowdown, and the choices we have reduced to what is offered in our neighborhoods, is like going back a hundred years or being dropped into the middle of Wyoming. It satisfies a longing inside I too often forget is there. The longing for a quiet and gentle life.

The longing for silence and solitude.

Before I left for my trip to the Midwest, I selected May Sarton’s “Journal of a Solitude” as my airplane and hotel reading material. I had no idea I was about to experience a powerful collision of the contents of her reflections on silence and solitude and art with the forced slowdown of my social world. But here I am, looking out my window at the plumb tree in springtime, discovering again what was beginning to slip away from me: In order to be present to God, and to my life, I must have silence. I must have solitude. I must get off the ride, not for a minute here and there, not just a pool to refresh my feet, but for blocks of time. I need mornings of silence, or afternoons alone.  I need to dive into rivers and oceans of quiet, to float effortlessly alone.

I know this from experience. But then, I am pulled away by my egoistic need to produce something and appear relevant, through my own fault, through my own fault, through my own grievous fault.

I know the value of silence, of solitude, of doing nothing but sitting on a bench or a rock or a tree trunk in the woods or on a mountain or in my backyard, and with nothing to plan, nothing to prove, and nothing to hide, to look deeply into what is right in front of me.

I also know what it is to lose the sense of wonder and my appreciation of the beauty that is his world as I immerse myself in activities I feel I must do to stay relevant—then to have it return after an afternoon of hiking or reading or writing or praying. I know what it is like to drop the egocentric living simply in the act of doing nothing.

It is to regain a sense of awe and wonder of life—to not just notice, but to embrace the beauty of this world, beauty only recognized in the sea of silence.

After years of bouncing back and forth between the Ego driven life of self-reliant activism and the quiet letting go that comes from times of solitude, I know the difference. I have tasted the sense of oneness with God and his creation that comes from getting and staying quiet.

I know the feeling of rejuvenation, and renewal, and an invigorated consciousness that the physical world contains within it the fullness of God—to see again that the world is my eternal home, an eternity that has already begun and that I am only aware of when I take time to be alone in silence.

I don’t know what will happen over the next several weeks as the coronavirus runs its course. I pray for it to die soon.

I also know that sometimes an undesired event or interruption often has the effect of changing the way we see life and how we arrange what is important to us.

May this undesired event bring me back to the practice of silence, of solitude, of seeing and loving this world anew.

Kind Regards,

Bob