Love in a time of Virus: Wildfire
Dear Friends,
I write you on day 4 or 5 (I am losing track) of being unable to be outside at all because of air quality from nearby wildfires. I am stumbling from one zoom room to another where we all say to each other, it’s all too much. And it is. It is too much. Too much pain, too much destruction, too many problems to even hold in our hearts and minds. 
There is a very large maple tree across the street from my house. Since the pandemic started, I have been getting to know the maple because I have so many opportunities to observe and be with, instead of drive by, the giant tree. I sit sometimes on my yoga mat after my practice while the dust is settling inside me, and I watch the wind and leaves rumble and dance. From the front porch where I read or write sometimes, I take breaks to gaze at the enormous tree and feel her presence. In the days before the fires last week, there was a wind storm here in Portland. They called it a “100 year wind”. I watched as my maple friend across the street released, too early, leaves as a concession. After a couple of days and disrupted nights of the wind battering us, the wind stopped and the smoke set in. For days, I watched the outer edge of the evacuation zone as it sat threateningly 10 minutes away. It felt like the wind stopped so suddenly and then we were left in sickening stillness. Now the trees aren’t moving in the wind, the birds are not singing. There is a heaviness in the air and in our hearts.The maple stands eerily still across the street and it fills my heart with sadness to look through the grey air and see her.
It is difficult to hold all of the challenges we are facing. I was still working on writing to you about learning to say the words white supremacy when the West Coast caught fire. I am still grieving the loss of being able to sit with clients, supervisees, friends and family. Grieving the baby I cannot hold, the friends I cannot hug, the office I am not using. And I am lucky, of course, being able to work at all, not being sick, not being in direct threat of fire and having the means to protect myself against air that should be life giving but is, in fact, toxic. It all weighs heavier when I consider our growing houseless population outside, unprotected from this air.
Before the winds and fire, I was trying to write to you about white supremacy and the word liberation. I will continue to work on this as the smoke clears. George Floyd couldn’t breathe, and I won’t let myself forget or move on. There is layer upon layer of painful wounds and it seems right now we are being asked to feel the pain of them all. The heaviness in the air and the bruised sky is a constant reminder that we are failing as a species. I like to think that the Earth will go on. That she will shrug off humanity as a failed experiment, and after healing time, she will go on, life will go on. There is a statistic that couples are in distress for an average of 7 years before they seek out couple therapy. People have to be very distressed to be willing to try to change. How distressed do we have to be to hear the call of our planet?
What do we do when it is indeed too much? I don’t know. What I know is that the air is grey, and when I look outside the word that comes to mind is death. What I know is that I continue, along with many others, to do my best to show up at my computer for sessions every day in my guest room in my basement while people continue to die in the US every day from COVID-19 at a mind numbing pace. What I know is that another black man was shot in the back in front of his children for no reason last week. And when I sit to see my next couple, it’s all there and we help each other hold it, it’s so much, we say. And then we work and move, me looking for the parts of self they had forgotten and them being brave and facing those parts. And for a moment or two, I forget I am online in another part of the city from these souls. We are all humans in a room and healing is somehow happening. This is all I know to do when there is indeed too much.
Stay close,
Sharon