Like all of us, I am dealing with this weird pandemic world the best I can. Walking through fog, waiting, wondering…these are the things that await us each morning when we rise. Some people are drinking a lot of coffee. I’ve been wandering around the neighborhood looking at flowers and birds. For these past days, as my morning trip to the health club has been replaced (unintentionally, I might add) with this ever lengthening morning search for signs of life, I’ve started taking a picture or two and sharing it on social media with an occasionally pithy comment. And now, I’ve decided to capture these musings for “posterity” as part of my blog-o-sphere. Here is my post from March 18, 2020:

This morning walk time now belongs to the birds, the construction workers and the dog walkers in my neighborhood, and yet, there is this. Good morning all.

Looking back (June 10, 2021): It took a little effort to figure out just where the process of #pandemicpractice began for me, but that figuring out was important. I don’t want to forget. I don’t want to obsess either, but as I read over and over again the ways in which we as a culture selectively “forget,” collectively “forget,” I am ever more driven to counter that tendency, at least in my own life. And so I sat for hours on social media, going through my posts during these times, looking at my pictures, remembering my walks. This, I believe, was the beginning of a sense of purpose in what I was doing.

I know that I had, by this date, been walking in the mornings for about two weeks. I am able to trace that date back to a spiritual direction appointment on my calendar — an appointment that became my very first virtual appointment because I had just received the news that the Seminary had been exposed to the new virus through Patient 0 in Washington, D.C. That day, I moved my appointment and I stopped going to the gym to workout. This was several days before the shutdown of life as we knew it became city-wide.

This post, these azaleas, represent my first attempt to look past my fear and see what I was walking through every morning. Until this moment, I was walking with the power of pure adrenaline.