Fitness at home

For me it’s time to stop counting the days and just be in the moments as they come. These are the Covid-19 days, a shock to our old ways of life but also an opportunity. I have found some encouragement.

Arundhati Roy says we’ve reached a “portal—a gateway between one world and the next,” and she hopes we will find our way to a world beyond capitalism and exploitation of the earth and other beings.

One of my Buddhist teachers posted a thirty-minute video of a traditional doctor in Zimbabwe who says we are being called (by the virus) to heal our relationships with ourselves, each other, and the earth. He advocates meditation, reconnecting with our reverence for the natural, and letting go of attachment to material things. I think it's important to remember the systemic poisons as well, but I don't take issue with any of his recommendations.

I hope a new and better, more healed and reconnected world is on the way. What if the work of this moment is offering thanks? I have so many friends and loved ones, cities, animals, trees, books, beaches, and bodies of water to thank. Not just the idea of friends, but the names of them and the clothes they wore, thanks to those who made me laugh and to the actors, dancers, sculptors and musicians. Thanks to the school of dolphins that leapt and whistled past me in the Indian Ocean on my birthday in 1997. Thanks to the poets whose words, whose words have taken me where I needed to go. Thanks to myself for playing the cards I was dealt in creative and courageous ways, and for making the life-wrecking mistakes that taught me what never to do again. I haven’t said thank you enough.

Thank you, Blip friends, thank you for being on this journey with me and for inviting me to be with you. Thanks for your photographs and your words, your daily lives (because all our lives are daily, but each is daily in a different way). Thanks for your wishes and blessings. This book I am trying to write is a book of thanks.