“I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered. I don’t have a friend that feels at ease. I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered or driven to its knees.”
I’m fairly certain I’m not the only one among us who walks around the kitchen while prepping a meal and thinks about this past year. Like you, I too shake my head in disbelief and muse, “what a year.” Do you remember random moments that in “normal years” you might otherwise have forgotten? It’s uncanny isn’t it? I remember exactly where I was sitting while dividing my dahlias, a task I do every year and never think about. This year I recall clearly. I was sitting on the brick patio to the right of the red flowering camellia. It was early afternoon. The sky was spring grey. It was warmish. I looked up at the sky and heard our governor give the stay at home orders. I had never realized how many hummingbirds my garden had until I caught them from the corner of my eye every day. They beat their wings and darted around drinking from newly opened buds while I said to the thumbnails of my students in front of me, “feel your feet.” My bathwater was running when I received news a family friend died of Covid.
For me, putting a wrap on the fall session at the Moon is also putting a wrap on 2020. While I do what needs to be done at year’s end, I reflect on all of it: the tragedies, the garden, the classes, the news, the now. I’ve always felt calendars are arbitrary in a way; the cycles of the universe just keep on going without pages turning or apps clicking open to remind us about it. However from the beginning calendars and time keeping devices seem to be what we humans do best to contain the uncontainable and define ourselves within it. So here we are once again. As the Pandemic ignores us and the time we try to concretize around it, we reflect on the year behind us and ignite our hope for a better year ahead.
Though I am an optimistic person by nature and by cultivation I admit to a few, ok many, #f2020 hashtags this year. It can be said by most accounts it was a rotten year. Yep, #f2020. We all can make that long list. However, when I was thinking about what I wanted to say in this year-end blog I realized what I really want to think about as I head into the unknown future, is what went right. Because for me, in many many ways, this year was amazing. I suspect for you too, you can find more than just a couple of things that actually went right over the course of 2020.
First and foremost I feel the pandemic took a big eraser to aspects of my personal past that needed to go. About half-way through the year I realized I had simply let go of buried grudges and resentments I didn’t even realize I was holding on to. Those little things that had build up over time, some over a lot of time, had created a shelter of sorts for my heart/mind to hide out in. Perhaps because it moved so quickly, perhaps because we were gobsmacked with how fleeting life truly is, this year vaporized that shelter. Feeling myself without it has been fascinating and is allowing me to participate in life anew.
Teaching online has been challenging, but an incredibly liberating process. I frankly didn’t realize I could do it as well as I have been able to. Those who know me may not realize I am actually shy by nature and struggle with my self-esteem. I was loathe to have mirrors in any studio I taught in because frankly I just didn’t want to look at myself. All the “things” I was “doing wrong” were a distraction to my work of teaching what I knew was correct. Enter March 23, 2020 and there I was, looking at myself ALL THE TIME. I had to laugh at the karmic injustice of it all! However, to do my job I had to quickly drop my self-consciousness and adapt to the format so I could convey the method to my students. As the year unfolded and my skill in the new tech matured, I’ve found a great deal of pleasure and possibility in the process. My personal skill has improved too. As has that of my students. One might even say, it’s been fun!
This online year has given me a strong lifeline. Technology that did not exist in the pandemic of 1918 has kept me connected to my friends, students and family on a more frequent basis than I normally would have. It has also opened relationships with new people all over the world I likely would never have met otherwise. I love to travel, especially traveling for training. And though this year I have not gotten on a plane but one time for family business, I have trained with people from all over the United States, South America, Europe and Australia. Because of these unexpected opportunities, I have new students, new teachers, I have deepened my skill and my capacity to bravely speak languages not my own. Primarily however I have new friends with whom I have much in common. I suspect we will all meet in person when the time is right. And won’t that be something!
Sometime in the future when I think back on this year, I hope I remember all of it. And I trust the lessons learned this year will be allowing me a better life then. There has been so much suffering, but there has also been so much positive change. New lifestyles, deeper connections with amazing folk, productive self-reflection. For me, during the Pandemic of 2020 when everything fell apart for our world, our country, our communities and our families, many things also went right. If we allow ourselves to feel beyond the hashtag: #f2020, we might see our world did not become smaller and more fractured, on the contrary it has become much much bigger and more connected.
In closing, I would like to add that a big joy for me this year has been getting to know so many of the Moon students better. Perhaps even better than when we met on the floor in person in “regular” classes during a normal calendar year. The pre and post class chats, the emails about what is going on in our lives, the photos of new babies, new homes, and what we have all done to adapt and thrive, have sustained and enlivened me in ways I’ll never be able to fully express. You Moon students are exactly who I thought you were: kind, generous, compassionate, artistic, funny. In essence: amazing! Thank you for sharing yourself so openly this year. You’ve made me a better teacher and person. Respect!
So here we go, 2021 looms into view. This will be a year like none other too. I believe 2020 has given us skills and fortitude to preserver and even thrive as the continuing cycles of the great unknown roll ever on. I wish you well as the calendar turns. Stay safe.
See you on the floor!
Kim
Here is a lovely cover of Paul Simon’s An American Tune by Sonny Ozell
(married to Patrick Stewart!) Have a listen.
“It’s alright, it’s alright, you can’t be forever blessed. Still, tomorrow is another working day and I’m just trying to get some rest.
I’m just trying to get some rest. ”