Our Way of Loving the World Right Now Heather Lanier
T
he cardinals flitted from the platform feeder to the ground, and the squirrels snagged crusts we tossed from the kids’ morning toast, and none of the backyard creatures knew that the humans were about to “shelter-in-place.” On this March morning, a literal haze descended on our plot of earth as suddenly as a rumor: Lockdown forthcoming. Our phones had been pinging with texts and calls all morning. Did we have enough food for a month? friends wanted to know. My husband, not prone to panic or even quick movement, grabbed the keys and the hand sanitizer and split for the store. I stayed with our girls, six and eight. “Let’s do morning meditation outside,” I told them. They cheered, maybe because morning meditation was new for them, maybe because so was this daily chaos—no school, no schedule, no clear workday for the parents, who now muttered the word pandemic in the kitchen. The six-year-old handed a dull bell to the eight-year-old, then kept a shinier one for herself. We sat facing each other on the concrete patio. The two girls clanged their bells, piercing an octave higher than any bird. The six-year-old wanted to chant Om. Not my practice, but okay. For sixty seconds, we chanted: Om. Aum. As in ow and aw. As in um and amen. As in, the sound that some mystics think holds all the cosmos, like a big bowl into which can fit every planet and person and fear and prayer.
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