May 6, 2020: Musings in May

Common but beautiful… Red Wing Blackbird.

How is your spirit?

This week, as we trudge into the third month of this time of isolation and global health crisis, I’m hearing and reading more and more about how challenging this time is for relationships, for parenting, for teens, and for elderly people.

These are challenges that go beyond the obvious ones of unemployment, financial insecurity, food shortages, and illness.

Those of us who have been marginally affected but mostly inconvenienced may feel guilty if we complain. But feeling that we don’t have the right to sadness, even despair, adds another layer to a complex and even convoluted emotional terrain. We may feel that we don’t deserve to be depressed: after all, we have food, shelter and adequate protection.

Dear friends, loved ones, in this time, we all must grieve.

Those of us who are older may be grieving the loss of precious time with grandchildren, times of connection and creativity, travel that nourishes and inspires us, freedom to move about in this elegant unfolding of spring and summer.

In the congregation I served in New Jersey, a couple in their early eighties were birders who shared their knowledge with me and others. Our church was near the Forsythe National Wildlife Area, and we met there in early mornings so they could teach me how to spot, identify and learn the calls of the shorebirds that lived there as well as the thousands who migrated through each year. They were “life-listers” and had traveled the world, even leaving their jobs for a year to journey to remote vistas to “collect” sightings of rare and hard-to-spot species. One Spring they’d planned a trip when our church was having an event, and they were telling me how sorry they’d be to miss it.

“I don’t know how many springs I have remaining,” the man said to me. He meant both how many, and how few he imagined he’d be able to see, hear and hike to the birds.

I think this is the kind of grief I feel and maybe some of you do, as well. We don’t know how many seasons we have left, and we must properly grieve all that we have lost and will lose. It’s not wrong or bad to feel sad for yourself. It’s a way of letting go.

You will return to life again.

And, it’s fine to be frustrated, discouraged, even depressed. If the low feelings last for weeks and you are having trouble sleeping, eating, or functioning, please reach out to a counselor or health care provider for help. Let us know, if you can, so we can help you weather these actual and metaphorical storms. We need you, not just in your joy, but in your sorrow. Just as joy and sorrow are interwoven in each of us, and make us whole, so it is with community.

You are not alone. You are loved. You are precious to me and to one another.

Hang on, reach out, be gentle with one another and with yourself.

Love, Cynthia

The Atlantic City, NJ skyline, seen from the Edwin B. Forsythe Wildlife Refuge. Osprey in nest. This and the Cape May refuge are two of the top bird migration spots in the world.