I wasn’t sure how to come back to the world and share after my experience with Covid. 

The grief I feel from this, for all of us, is immense. 

I brought this grief to a park recently and planted my palm onto the tree, asking if it could take some of it on for me as it had become too much to bear. 

Nature has this way of transmuting what feels weighty. I craved this, craved a more rootedness in my bones, to be grounded into something safe, I felt so unsafe in a long while. 

There is something there that touches the knowingness deep within me and sends its energy like a surge through my body as a reminder that although the heaviness is here and real and true, there is this, too. 

I find how deeply in awe I am of my body and its strength, I bow to it in gratitude, I sigh deeply covering my heart in honor for the deep trauma it’s experienced, for the trauma it carries of my ancestors experience through something eerily similar. 

Before this viral journey began, I was going through some of my old things and found a report I did on my paternal great-grandmother, Eleanor.  

Grandma Eleanor was the only grandparent I knew from my Dad’s side and the grandparent who was most involved in my life. 

The school report was an interview of the most interesting person I knew and that was Grandma Eleanor from New York. 

She had been orphaned at a young age, both her parents died during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918. This wasn’t the first time I had this piece of information but the reminder shook me- how recent it all was and similar to today’s pandemic.

The first case of Spanish flu, by the way, was later found out to have occurred in a lab in Kansas that was creating vaccines. When I learned this I wondered if the same propaganda machine that was able to cleverly blame Spain for the flu made Covid synonymous with China?..Think the Rockefeller’s and Big Pharma.

Reading through theories on the Spanish flu I saw glaring similarities to today’s pandemic machine. 

The deception and half truths, the forced agendas, these too are the inherited traumas passed down through our generations. We are experiencing our own trauma and the trauma of our ancestors is being activated in our bones.

With the Covid comes more than a virus, but a feeling of pure, raw surrender, of my sovereignty nearly being striped away and be cast aside by the demands put on us to isolate, stay inside, feed the Capitalist machines that gobble our money to pay for the inconveniences of their virus. 

The things that are masked as ‘help’ when unwrapped just cloak us in a deeper dependency on their systems and keep us further from each other. 

I had this knowingness rise within me at this time, that if my life was built on more similar principles of my ancestors like living and eating off of their own land and less on the conveniences of modern society, I would be more well cared for. 

At some point, even if it was a very far ways back, I have ancestors, family, blood relatives, kin-who leaned on community, who healed and survived because of them. 

My version of this was much watered down with mere check-ins and well-wishes over text chain. 

Friendly neighbors with hearty soup have been replaced by grocery delivery services that can flake and leave you days without food. 

It feels as if the closer to and the more we understand the raw resources of the earth, the more our own we are. The more cared for and nourished we are. The more at home.

It struck me just how far from the source, from my roots I have become. I find little solace in knowing that this was part of a larger plan all along. 

I remember this feeling of togetherness that seemed to just exist, a community in which I thrived without having to try at all, not too long ago as a child in the small suburban neighborhood where I was raised. I grew up surrounded by families and other kids my age who would play together on our cul-de-sac until the sun started to fade, one of the mom’s sounding whistle signifying that it was time to go home to our parents.

They each took turns keeping an eye on us, carpooling except on the days we walked the canal to school together. These memories of warmth may not necessarily easily created overnight, but I know that it’s possible.

Just to be sure I ask my kin long gone whose path I walk, can I ever return? To the earth? To community? To soul family? To source? 

My ancestors answer to me through birdsong atop a chimney chiming back, ‘yes, yes!’

I take a deep, breath and I remember how true this is….

Today I live just down the hill from where my dad went to the middle school as a kid. In the city both he and I were born. I walk in the park next to my Uncle’s old high school and once passed passed the building downtown my Grandfather used to call home. 

When I was young my Uncle moved Grandmother Eleanor out to California from New York to live near us. She ended up playing a big role in my upbringing. 

She cooked and cleaned for us, gave us old yogurt containers to make sandcastles, handed us seashells that she kept on a bookshelf telling us that if we listened closely enough we could hear the ocean. 

She kept dried orange peels by the door for good health, one of the same ingredients, I realize only now as I type this, that is in the Zinc I use today for treating the virus….

So maybe we return to the old a little bit, everyday without even knowing it. Through people, through the community I’ve created for myself though it may be more distant and virtual than the ones my ancestors lived in. True to the current times, I got my Zinc from an Instagram account.

Regardless, maybe we’re not so far away from being a community as I  thought….

And even if we are, I don’t think it  matters how long we were away, we can always create more community.