NORMAL
week 8 | may 10 - may 17
NORMAL
If someone had told us before “all this” that by mid-May we would be used to regularly monitoring the availability of toilet paper, that we would be accustomed to 2-dimensional digital representations of our friends and family, and that we wouldn’t have met as a church in the flesh in over 2 months we would be aghast and in disbelief. And yet, here we are. There is a new sense of “normal” in this “abnormal” time, and it is weird. I don’t think it will ever really feel normal, nor should it, but we have been living differently for long enough that we’re feeling its impression on our lives.
Below you will see how some of our church family reflected on the word “normal.” Some of the pieces deal with what’s normal for them or their families now (good or bad), or what feels abnormal, and still others looked more broadly upon the word and help us see “normal” in the context of all life and experience. This week we have references to coffee, a COVID baby theory (it’s not what you think), Ozymandias (from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 sonnet), flowers, and climbing children. Please enjoy.
Lucy Loves the New Normal
Lorri Eiswold
photography
Normal
Steve Hunt
When I was young
I’d hear the news in a vague way
as 6 year olds do
“Reporting from Hanoi
Viet Cong guerrillas have seized” …
And I wondered how apes could fire rifles.
Then I heard about Black Panthers
and demonstrations and shootouts and
revolutionaries and Marxists and I pondered
how big cats could cause such a commotion.
This was normal.
Then I grew older and I believed that alcohol
was the panacea for timidity
and that cigarettes were easy to quit
and parents were simply fools.
This, too, I believed was normal
Then I crossed the Jordan
and found the Truth.
Not a truth, but a definite article the.
Faith: Water to wine. Feeding 5000.
Risen from the dead.
The normal Christian life.
But what is normal?
There’s para and super;
below and above.
Your new may be my old
and her old may be his new.
And we may never find our back
on this abnormal journey to normal.
Jumping Into Summer
Rebecca Willette
The COVID Baby Theory
Andrea Pope
It's been a long time since I've written anything - something happened two years ago when I found out I was pregnant with my third child (the one I never thought we'd have. A gift! A surprise! Everything!). It seemed all my creative energy went into growing the new life inside me and all other creative endeavors evaporated. I felt better when I read one of my fave nonfiction works of Madeleine L'Engle's (The Summer of the Great Grandmother):
“. . .my creative energy is being drained. . . .a woman cannot be creative in two ways simultaneously, and that I would not be able to write while I was carrying the baby."
We welcomed baby Ole, and then all other creative endeavors resided in my mind because: all energy was given to nursing and my school age kids and watching Poldark (because the kids went to school and what else could be better than sitting on the couch with a nursing infant?). How could I write when other people wrote such cinematic brilliance for me to enjoy postpartum?!
Now the baby is a "Taby" (toddler -baby. The variety who screams when happy, screams when sad, screams when his dad leaves the room, screams when he can't have the ipad during FaceTime calls. We adore him in all ways). It is May 2020, and a regular prayer from my 7 year old son is "Lord please help everyone who has COVID." My 10 year old daughter is making banana bread for a teacher who might have COVID. My kids don't ask if we can go anywhere, they know they won't be going back to school, they expect to eat pizza 3 times a week and 8 snacks a day. We've been mostly home for 7 weeks, long enough to be comfy in our new normal and now looking back and looking around and looking ahead I can't help but think . . .
I feel like I had another baby.
click here to continue reading
Coffee
Naomi Hamer
sketchbook: pen & watercolor
Normal
Marty Ochs
pen
Normal is laughing, playing, roughhousing children. Playgrounds are quiet. I'm looking forward to the time when we see this again.
Mirage
Barbara LaTondresse
Is the glass half empty or half full?
Or perhaps there is no glass at all.
Only the illusion of the glass.
Are we as a nation that needy?
Are we lost in a desert of our own making?
Are we another Ozymandias reborn in the good old USofA?
All that remains of this ‘king of kings’ is a broken statue to former glory and the empty words full of loss.
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.”
Great rulers and their kingdoms will fall, dust to dust.
Ozymandias-like we strut our transient power unaware
our desperate need of Eternal water else
we become another thirsty relic in the sand.
That a drop of water would
quench thirst in this dry,
parched land is a pipedream.
Oh, to get the cool water drawn from the well that shall never run dry; Eternal
Water drawn from the Eternal Well.
King of kings and Lord of lords!
Eternal Power. Eternal Spring.
When?
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Background Notes:
Ozymandias is the title of two related sonnets published in 1818. The first was written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and was published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. The poem was included the following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems, and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826. Shelley's most famous work, Ozymandias is frequently anthologized.
Read Shelley’s short sonnet to gain essential background to understand my poem Mirage. How does this fit with the prompt NORMAL ?What do you think the NEW NORMAL will be?
Happy Hearts
Nora Pickens
paint & marker
A new normal for us has been hanging our “school” artwork on the fridge. It makes our hearts happy!
Sibling Friends
O’Neil Children
Our kids aren’t at grade school age, so we haven’t had the major transition from school to home like many. They were already mostly home. And yet there have been enough changes in their little social lives to make them realize that in the lack of preschool and playdates they need to create their own adventures amongst themselves. This is their new normal. I have seen my 5, 4, and 2 year old grow in their ability to imagine and pretend and create and play together. There are many beautiful moments. And then there are moments when we discover permanent marker on the wall, a toothbrush in the toilet, indoor sinks overflowing with mud, daddy’s CD’s in the sandbox, and that 2 rolls of toilet paper have been unrolled (the tp stashed stealthily in a cupboard) so the cardboard tubes can be used to make “binoculars.” And yet, even in the chaos, we find it a gift to witness the beginnings of such adventurous friendships. In the course of their lives siblings have to go through a lot together, and for these little ones we pray these abnormal times may be strengthening their souls for the journey.
Safe at Home
Phil Olson
Mary and I arrived 3/12/2020, 8 weeks ago here at the family lake home in Amery Wisconsin, a town of 2902 people, an hour northeast of the Minnesota/Saint Paul metropolitan area, the home of our four adult kids, their spouses, and our 10 grandchildren, age 8-17. Normally, we would have been in the cities for several days each weekend, with family, friends, and active at our beloved Anglican church. Sadly like the rest of the country, we are “staying home” or “sheltering at Home” for the benefit of our own health (as we both turn 76 this year), and for the good of all during the coronavirus pandemic.
We have chosen to use the term “Safe at Home”, as it has a more positive tone, and it reminds us of baseball, which we both love as Minnesota Twins fans, and miss greatly during what would have been the beginning of a promising season, for which we have had great hopes and expectations. We obviously also miss time with family and friends, some of which has been possible by Zoom for family games, and conversations, which are occurring each Tuesday night. We attend our church by live video streaming as well, but it seems a weak substitute, for our regular in person liturgical services, complete with weekly Eucharist, and conversations with friends before and after the services.
On a recent video conference on Ethics and the Pandemic an ethicist suggested that the term “social distancing” should not be used, as it seems to imply isolation, using instead “physical distancing” which can be associated with continuing rich relationships by text, email, phone Skype, zoom etc. and also outdoors contacts with 6-10 foot distancing, which we hope to do when the weather improves, with family and a few neighbors!
Springtime Flowers at the Arboretum
Rebecca Willette
