A Letter in Return

And how do you live and what are your fears during this crisis? What a question to surface after midnight from across the world! In your country is it the time of day to wrestle all the existential and daily dreads until, like Jacob and the vicious angel, they concede to bless us? I am afraid that people I love will die. I am afraid that my child is inheriting a world so much harsher than what she deserves. I am afraid that desperate times call for desperate measures and I am not quite desperate enough. Should I go on? I am afraid that people have wandered away from the very idea of truth. I am afraid we have unlearned how to speak, and how to listen. I am afraid the fabric that holds us together is woven more loosely than I thought and people keep slipping through. And how do you live? With grief. With fear. With laughter. With boredom. With glee. With contentment. With fury. With hope. With the firm conviction that no thing cancels any other thing out. Death does not cancel life. Grief does not cancel joy. Fear does not cancel conviction. Nor any of those statements in reverse. Make your heart a bowl that is large enough to hold it all. Imagine that you are the potter. Stretch the clay. Cherish the turning wheel. Accept that the bowl is never going to be done.