Valentine’s Day dawned overcast and cold and damp. No matter. Because since June, every Sunday morning, you'll find me outside on farmland bordering the Sacramento River. Music radiates from my trusty old Mackies and a hardy group spreads out all over the property to dance.

I’m old enough to remember the 1955 polio outbreak, the long lines of kids waiting for their vaccine sugar cube. I can only imagine my parent’s fear. But they had already lived thru scarlet fever, mumps, diptheria, whooping cough. They had already lost friends and family and felt gratitude for the science behind vaccine.

Fifty years ago I kept a 20 week standing date with a cadaver. Without fail. Every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, eight to noon, scalpel in hand, trusty Gray’s Anatomy propped at my side. My original oft-referenced fifty year old text pictured above. Me and three intrepid lab partners dived in, layer by amazing layer.

I’m totally indifferent to any debate about science validity. For me, it’s a given. Neil Tyson said, “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe it.” Totally resonate. Given the fact that science just is, what intrigues me is it’s intersection with the sacred. The co-mingle of science and magic. The marriage of science and art.

My children, constant source of inspiration and wonder to me. I feel them so deeply, mid-life stream, transforming through adulthood's unrelenting lessons. Juggling more than we prepared them for, showing a maturity of utter grace, ever-thoughtful skill and consideration. This pandemic year has crystallized a slow change in our relationship. The children they were always palpable beneath these astounding adults. The parents we were a fading memory overlaid by the elders we have become. Who worries more about whom is now a toss up.

The ground of current events, the shifting backdrop of threats to our well-being, the hypnotic media messaging…it just keeps crashing on our shores. I wake each day and wonder what it will be. Spiking pandemic and vaccine news, wildfires waiting in the wings, protests and boarded buildings, chaotic politics and disputed elections. And now? In case that was not enough? A riptide of violence, raging humans who are so dispirited and desperate. People who are armed with weapons and values that I struggle to fathom. I have no answers, only questions.

After The Holidays you might expect an essay about how unique, how challenging, how memorable the past two weeks were.  And they were.  But this morning I am curious about distraction, which the dictionary defines as 1) a thing that prevents someone to giving full attention to something else 2) extreme agitation of the mind or emotions.  Maybe this topic is connected to The Holidays.

Plant medicine…trending way to politely reference pychotropic drugs. We are so creative with our euphemisms. Back in the day…well, I digress. But I've been steeped in plant medicine this week. Not the kind of plant medicine one might call in, but medicine all the same. You're lucky if you've never been gifted an excruciating brush with poison oak.

Have you felt a bit spur of the moment lately?  Carpe diem inclined?  Something about these times sparks this muscle in me.  It was mid-December when I looked at the long stretch of no-dance-scheduled time approaching. 

Last Sweat Your Prayers 2020 this morning, in Zoom-land and live in the garden we covered ourselves in white, called in the promise of light. A hope, a dream, a spark at the end of this long and winding tunnel.

If it wasn’t for death and disparity and distress. If 10,000 people world-wide every day were not dying of this virus. If it wasn’t that 20,000,000 human beings are currently infected with Covid. Grief and tragedy and heartbreak.

Been learning from avowed hermits lately. Not recluses, who isolate out of basic human disdain. But hermits. Who live a life oriented to solitude, filling extra time with contemplative practice rather than social interaction.

In a year when much has been lost, we turn to gratitude Thursday. We give thanks for all we still have. Which is what I really want to write about this morning. But first this invitation. I bet you have food on your table. Probably in abundance.

On my way to an inquiry about fully inhabiting the power of being, I was kidnapped by the word fluency. I’ve taught classes aplenty on the rhythm of flow. I wanted another way in, a quality more all encompassing than feminine, circles, receptive, earth, interior, dark, inhale, continuous, weighted.

All last week I waited. Paralyzed. Obsessed by a future hanging in the balance. Where were you Saturday when the election news came down? I bet we’ll always remember. I was buying poblano peppers at the Ferry Building Market in San Francisco. A sun drenched crowd erupted in spontaneous acclaim. I love California.

Friday morning. Sitting fireside. Feeling more hopeful than I have in a week. Sensing how long the road is in front of us. Mega healing and repair. Uncertainty. Despair. Exhaustion.

Jeanne Lohmann’s poem What The Day Gives inspired me, gave voice to what has been astonishing me all week. I hope this serve as inspiration for you this morning. Her poem is interspersed in this musing:

Suddenly, sun. Over my shoulder

in the middle of gray November

what I hoped to do comes back, asking.

On Saturday nights, Social Distance Theater has been holding parking lot converted to courtyard space in a funky 25th & R warehouse complex. Pre-pandemic it housed two theaters, the Poetry Center and various workshop rooms. Now it is an outdoor haven for live musicians to offer their craft to a few scattered patrons in the balm of a Sacramento summer night. What will happen when winter hems us in?

Six months ago on Mother’s Day my daughter gave me a special gift: StoryWorth. Every week a question comes to my in my inbox and I write a story, often a family memory. At the end of the year 52 stories will be compiled in a book.

Seated with friends around a big table, sharing food, laughter, conversation. From the outside, a scenario that appears entirely normal. But now there are visible signs of change: this physical distance thing and safe dining etiquette and masks on-off and pandemic talk. But still it pretty much looks like it used to.