Morphing

How have you adapted to the changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic?

It’s been four years since the shut down. That was a weird time. The first day everything in our life closed. Oh my! Work. G is a contractor. I was staging homes and working at a yoga studio which closed its doors forever. The gym. The beach. We were used to being pretty active, but suddenly there was no walking or running or surfing at the beach. No yoga, no working out. All of our mental health hacks seemed to be gone in one day.

Liquor stores stayed open. We started walking in our hilly neighborhood. I had a small group of yoga friends who I walked with. We wore masks and spaced ourselves six feet from one another. We got the idea to invite our favorite yoga instructors over to teach in our back yards. Trevor started filming and putting his classes online. From there we established a daily yoga practice.

Our little group of yoga girls grew in number. We walked, we listened to talks, we celebrated birthdays. Did art projects. We became a kind of lock down family. we gave ourselves some structure. We kept our spirits up. We encouraged and championed each other.

One day I was sorting through my dried up art supplies and unfinished work and there scattered with other paintings were the beginnings of my book illustrations.. My favorite paints were used up or dried out.There was no money being made. I thought that I would revisit the project when life improved.

As the weeks turned to months and those months became years, I realized that waiting for a better day was possibly not going to happen any time soon. On day I hauled out the paintings in all their many stages of completion and started working on them. I was hearing stories of kids losing out on social interactions, many for most of their life. Teens getting slammed by social media in place of in person friendships. It was a stressful time for many young families and many children. I personally was trouble shooting for my own mental state and was in part saved by breath to movement yoga and meditation. I wondered if kids could be introduced to breath work.

The text and the pictures worked themselves together like a little miracles of sorts and slowly I had a story that reminded me of the world’s metaphorical cocooning.. Beatrix Butterfly was a covid metamorphosis story. I morphed, my friend’s morphed, the whole world morphed and so did Beatrix.

The pandemic changed nearly every aspect of my life. Many things not for the better, but the different life I have now, has unfolded with many interesting miracles. I miss our old yoga studio. I miss staging homes, I miss things from before 2020, but life does move on and I couldn’t help moving with it. I’m happy to have this nearly completed book now. It’s a triumph. Im surprised , yet not surprised by how its ending. Much the same as Beatrixs story, mine is still unfolding and I’m still breathing through it all. We all came out of the pandemic. And here we are.