Surely Joy

More than once since they began last spring, I’ve wanted to skip the Zoom vespers my church started amid the pandemic. “Screen fatigue is real,” we all say, and that’s true, but something keeps calling me back to this online congregation within a congregation, this constellation of kin who realize the value of a spiritual booster shot twice a month on Wednesday nights.

I especially had to force myself this week. The good news is I have a lot of paid work for the first time in more than a year. My brain is happy and my bank account will soon be too, but my back and neck and butt are not pleased to be spending long days in front of my computer again. My computer, such as it is; my desktop more or less died a few months ago, so my formal work station is now an ancient MacBook propped on a pile of books. It’s probably not the best long-term ergonomic solution, but it’s OK for now, as so many things are “OK for now” in this state of suspended animation in which we’ve lived for nearly a year.

So, wary of yet more screen time after an especially long work day, I decide to join vespers via my iPad, a good option when I want to be present but a little less tethered to the technology. The service is heavy, centered on a January-through-December remembrance of all that we lost in 2020, with many reminders that the toll of COVID-19 has fallen disproportionately hard on people of color and poor folks. I get up several times to do a few stretches. I assume the corpse pose on my floor for a while.

At long last, the litany is done. Our minister lights candles in memory of family and friends we’ve lost to the virus. (By this point in the pandemic, many of us have had that happen. I ask for a candle for Kelly, my friend who died last April.) The service has gone on for an hour and we are finally winding down when one among us says she wants to read a poem. And these days, who can deny a poem? So we take another minute, because that’s all it takes, to hear “The Patience of Ordinary Things” by Pat Schneider. It is beautiful, and once again, I am happy to have tuned in, happy to have these people and this poetry in my life, even via a small screen.

As with so many things in life, our technology can be both a blessing and a curse. The key, as always, is balance. During my now-long-again workdays, I get up to stretch as often as I can. I take walks, as often as not in a Seattle drizzle, because it’s worth it to be outside and breathe fresh air, even behind a mask.

As work re-asserts itself into a life that felt perfectly full in its absence, I can go days without checking social media. I pare back some of my online social calendar, which has grown robust over the past many months, begging “bandwidth issues.” I will miss something, but that’s OK. Ten months into this new way of being, we are all doing the best we can, and whatever we are doing is good enough.

“The Patience of Ordinary Things” can be read here. It’s also in Poetry of Presence, a 2017 volume I found a year later, shortly after Tom died. It is a beautiful anthology, worth having if you are “hungry for poems,” as a friend recently said. This week’s video is “Sanctuary” by Carrie Newcomer, also featured at vespers this week. Thank you for reading–and for sharing a small sliver of your too-much-screen-time with me.