Ippolitov-Ivanov

Another favorite piece of mine, Ippolitov-Ivanov's setting of Psalm 134, Come Bless the Lord.  His more well-known liturgical piece is a setting of the first Antiphon of the Divine Liturgy, but this piece remains dear to my heart.

Salvation is Created

Nothing profound to say, except to share this wonderful recording of a particular favorite of mine, Tschesnikov's Salvation is Created, by a favorite group of mine, Voces8 (pronounced "vohshus").

It was a salve to my soul tonight.

Postcards from the Edge

It's hard to know what to write.  We live on the East Coast, but I have family and friends in the interior of the country, and I think our lives are wildly divergent right now.  I live in a city that is on almost total lockdown, although we don't (yet) have curfews, and churches are still allowed to be open, although I expect that will change in the coming days. 

The city finally set up mobile testing units, but you can't get tested unless you have a doctor's order and a really good reason to get one, because they don't have enough.  The hospitals are running out of supplies already and are begging for masks.  (If you bought masks, please donate them to a hospital near you, as medical providers need them badly!)  There won't be enough ventilators for everyone who needs them.  It was a bad flu season already and the trees bloomed this week, so it is hard not to freak out with every runny nose or slight cough.

Lines at the stores are long and tedious, as the stores have implemented social distancing policies that only allow a certain number of people at a time, and seek to space out arrivals and departures accordingly.  The stores still open have begun rationing and have adjusted hours for cleaning and restocking, but I wish they had done so a few weeks ago when the panic started and shelves were stripped of paper goods, non-perishables, and hardy perishables.  Grocery deliveries are almost impossible to get now, unless you are able to wait for a slot that is two weeks out.  Given that we don't really know how long this will last, it is hard to know how best to plan.  The economic news is even more grim, and we are in for a lot more hardship in the time to come. 

It's a terrible catch-22, this social distancing experiment we're living in: keep people in isolation at home for week or months to slow the virus, flatten the curve, prevent some deaths, and the economy flatlines, or carry on as usual and 2.2 million people die in the U.S. as the health care system is completely overwhelmed, and many more suffer and receive inadequate care for other conditions.  It took 3 months to hit 100,000 cases, and just 12 days to nearly treble it. 

The isolation has been extreme, and I did kind of hit the wall with it on Thursday.  I've been homeschooling my kids all week, and having my daily schedule has been a big help in keeping a rhythm to our days.  The schedule posted on the wall helps the kids too, as they are all anxious and uncertain.  They know they are high risk and are worried.  Creating routines in the midst of uncertainty is one way of regaining some control.  We are still allowed to walk outside, so we've been doing so at least once during the day.  It helps keep the walls from closing in.

Our regular parish will close its doors after tonight's service because it is in a state that just went on total lock down until further notice.  We will live stream services from the monastery this weekend instead.

I hesitated to post this, as I know the news is not cheerful right now, but I also see some people still not taking this very seriously, and would hope that the message will get across loud and clear.  Please stay home as much as you can.  Take a walk in the sunshine or in the rain, but distance yourself from other people.  Have a dance party in your living room, do a zoom teleconference partywith your friends, but stay home.  It is hard, we are social beings, and crave contact.  I'm very introverted and I'm struggling; I feel for the extroverts out there who are likely feeling it more than me. 

But this is for all of us--to give more of us a chance to survive, to protect the vulnerable and elderly, to put the greater good ahead of ourselves. 

This is Lent.

The New Normal

*I started this post last week before the wide-spread closures began, but have tried to update to reflect the present moment.

Last week our school announced a two-week closure, so my kids came home Friday with all their books and will receive their assignments through e-mail.  It's a relief, in a way, because we've been waiting for it to happen, wondering when, and how, and now that it's here, we can just get on with things.  I won't say I'm not nervous about home-schooling four special needs kids for two weeks, or worried about the possibility of a longer-term closure; it is what it is, and we'll get through it.  I completely understand the reasoning (no one at our school has the virus, but the administration has decided in the interest of community safety and prudence, it was wiser to close now, ahead of the curve). *In the days since our school decided to close, the governor of our state ordered state-wide closures, and has also ordered non-essential public spaces to close and essential spaces to limit contact. 

I'm grateful for the foresight of our school administration, for thinking ahead and making plans.  We received detailed lesson plans for each kid yesterday, with additional resources to print out, plus more to come in the mail this week.  (From my own observations, it appears that a large number of schools across the country simply closed, either for two weeks or longer, told parents to school at home and good luck with that). 

It makes sense to flatten the curve of illness so that health care facilities can absorb the impact of large numbers of people getting sick during an already challenging flu season, and that means social distancing.  It's hard to think about the things we will all miss out on during these next weeks, but I was encouraged to read Nichole Roccas' post last week. 

In a way, the flurry of homeschooling means I don't have as much time to dwell on all the commentary online about the current situation.  I'm troubled by the number of people who are flip about the value of human life, and feel they can say the current situation isn't that bad because "only the vulnerable and elderly will die."  My family is vulnerable.  I'm vulnerable.  We are not disposable or fungible.  Every life has value.

What I will say about the present moment is this.  It is completely understandable and human to be afraid.  I am afraid at times.  My children are at higher risk because of their airway malacia, and I have asthma myself.  We don't know how this thing will end, or the final toll, both in human terms and otherwise.  How our societies will change and adapt as a result.  Most of us today don't have living memory of these sorts of things, and the speed and scale of this pandemic is also new, particular to our time and age.  Some good may come of it, as people work together to support one another through these tough times, and certainly some bad, but living in the uncertainty is difficult.

In the meantime, we are staying home, having dance parties a few times a day (I've busted out my early '90s hip hop, plus some other tunes with a good beat), taking a good long walk midday, working through the lesson plans sent by their excellent teachers, doing puzzles, playing games, and waiting to see what happens.  (Hats off to our teachers!  They are the best!)  I'm building breaks for myself into our schedule because I'm introverted and I can't go all day with four small people who talk non-stop without losing my mind.  😁 

For now, I'm off for my midday CSI + knitting break, and the kids have requested a square dance party later. 

Peace be with you.

March Magpie Madness ~Yarn Along~

How's that for an alliterative title??

 

~knitting~

I worked steadily on my Sorbet Doocot...right up until I got magpie fever and decided to stash bust some orangey-yellow yarn on a raglan cardigan for Ponchik.  In fairness, she is outgrowing almost all her sweaters right now, and we still have several months of layer-weather, whereas I can get along without another sweater at the moment.

 I've had the yarn for ages (two skeins of Preciosa from KnitPicks in a discontinued color), but I'm not sure I have enough, so I might have to augment with another color somewhere in there.  The yarn is a funny wind--it feels almost like knitting with roving, but the hand-dyed effect is undeniably pretty!  The yarn does have a subtle twist to it, so perhaps it is single-ply?  I have some vintage buttons that I think will match perfectly and am excited to use.

I've officially hit the part of the year where my hair makes me crazy and have been wearing berets on the regular.  The two I have aren't quite enough, so I swatched my ample supply of Lava Heather Swish for another, and have plans to make a second out of the leftover yellow yarn from last year's Daisy Carbeth (now retired, RIP).  I'm all about the yellow accents this year--it's my new neutral.

(This is a purchased hat, because I don't knit particularly fast, and just needed something).

 ~reading~

Nothing worth writing about.  A fantasty triology by Sarah J. Maas called The Court of Thorns and Roses.  It's fine--light bedtime reading.  Still haven't finished book two of the All Souls Triology or cracked anything I got for Christmas.  All in due season, I suppose.  Fr. Alexander Men's An Inner Step Toward God is back on my stack for a re-read during Lent.  I confess I've started this Lent with absolutely nothing--no reserve, no emotional filter, very little energy for much beyond the bare essentials of keeping the household running.  

~sewing~

Kinder Chinners!  The violin teacher at my kids' school approached me a few weeks ago about purchasing these for the younger violin students at the school (I head the Parent Association, and these kinds of requests often come to me).  They are used with beginning violin students to make the chin rest more comfortable for them.  When I priced them out, it was much cheaper to make them myself.  

It was the perfect Clean Week thing to do, and I spent yesterday cutting and sewing in an assembly line while watching Henry VI Part II and part of Richard the III with Benedict Cumberbatch as Richard.  (I decided that I can't give up screen time for Lent for a variety of reasons, but am restricting what I do watch to a narrow set of options).

~watching~

The second series of The Hollow Crown is good (but flawed as history, given Shakespeare's position at Elizabeth's court and the need to legitimize the Tudor throne).  Cumberbatch gives a great performance, but I like the first series better, both for the plays and the performances.  Also, can I just note that Anton Lesser is a very busy man these days?  He's become the British character actor to watch.  

Just before Lent started, I watched Kenneth Branagh's story about the end of Shakepeare's life called All Is True.  It was a good thing to watch without close attention (i.e. while folding laundry).  Ditto Knives Out, which was a collection of great performances, although Daniel Craig definitely stole the show.  The film is what would happen if Agatha Christie and Guy Ritchie had a movie baby together--ha!

My husband and I have been watching The Crown on and off for some time, and are slowly working through season 2 (I know, I know).  We watched episode six ("Vergangenheit") and it was stunningly good, grappling with issues of forgiveness and reconciliation, both at a societal and personal level.  My husband noted that the writers could have parsed this a bit further, and I agree, but given the complexity of the subject matter, I thought it was handled extremely well.  If you want to go all tin-hat conspiracy theory, if Joseph Kennedy had won the U.S. presidency in 1932 instead of FDR, and Edward VII had stayed king of England instead of abdicating, the world would have been a completely different place in 1950 (and by extension, today).

That's all I got today!  Linking with Ginny for Yarn Along.

Adaptation

Like everyone else in the world, I've been thinking about the times we live in lately, of economic instability and weird weather, of viruses and outbreaks, the lack of individual agency in the climate crisis, of all the things that the mass media would have us think portend the end of the world.  It is easy to panic in such an atmosphere, where it feels like everything you know and cherish might come to an end tomorrow. 

These things are cause for serious concern, but they are mostly things that sap our emotional energy with fruitless worry, since in truth, there is little we as individuals can do about any of it.  What will be, will be. I think it is worth remembering that we will all need to adjust to things as they happen, that we need not go into some sort of survivalist headspace that wants to take everything for oneself, to ensure self-survival.  I was reminded of Brian Kaller's excellent writing over the years on these topics--he is an American journalist living in Ireland with his family, and trying to reclaim some of the older ways of doing and being.  I've found him to be a sober and realistic correspondent, intent on reclaiming the small local bonds of community and ways of life that will see people through crises.

I went searching through his archives this morning, looking for a post he wrote a few years ago that stuck in my mind.  He talks about how our model for future change is almost universally dystopian, that some crisis is coming that will fundamentally alter the world in ways that will seem apocalyptic.  He says this vision is fantasy, and does no one any service (nor does it improve anyone's mental health).  Instead, he says we should be focusing on how to strengthen the bonds between ourselves, in community, because that is how we will weather change.  No man is an island, and the man with the most toys does not win in the end. 

He writes:

"[W]e have created a society that runs on coal and oil, which won’t last forever. Even the amount we’ve burned so far has changed the air so much that it is literally changing the weather around the world, creating more intense storms, harsher droughts, and greater extremes of heat and cold. Anyone who walks along the Irish shoreline can see the other main product of our civilisation, the plastic and other rubbish that now clutters the world’s seas, or piles up in landfills that have become the largest man-made structures on Earth.

Yet apocalyptic stories assume that our modern car-driving, computer-using culture will collapse overnight in some catastrophe, whether a robot Armageddon, climate disaster or Rapture – and the fact that we make entertainment about such horrors means that they are not really our fears, but our fantasies. And they offer the worst possible model for how to handle the realistic difficulties we might face in the future. Paranoid survivalists do not help build a delicate web of trust among neighbours, and millenarians will not help build lasting infrastructure for the next stage of history. The more people are convinced that we face a violent and despairing future, the more likely such a future becomes.

In the decades to come, as we have to cope with more difficult economic times, energy crunches and unexpected weather, more of us will have to grow more food ourselves, learn to use less energy from different sources, and buy more products made to be fixed and re-used rather than thrown away. It might be a reduction of our energy wealth by 10 percent, or 50 percent, or 90 percent – depending on your time and place -- but it’s literally not the end of the world, and we shouldn’t confuse the two.

And it will require more of us to form carpools, shopping co-ops, allotment clubs, medical co-ops, home-schooling networks and other such ad hoc organisations, and to cheerfully work with our neighbours to create new relationships – something people can and often do in a crisis, and exactly the opposite of what most science fiction depicts."

~Brian Kaller, "What Science Fiction Ought to Be," Restoring Mayberry blog, 21 June 2018.

Kaller goes on to talk about the sorts of stories that would be interesting and helpful to tell ourselves as our world changes, stories that would help to prepare us for times to come.  It's a great post, and he continues to develop these themes in a later review of a graphic novel. 

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves matter, and while I won't say anything so insubstantial as "what the world needs now is love," what I will say is what we need now are stories about human resilience and the ways in which people can come together to support one another in times of crisis.  Stories about breaching the walls that divide us, stories about creating common space between us. 

Be prepared for times of crisis, but don't panic, and keep an eye out for those who need help.  Because we all need a helping hand from time to time.