I said this a lot during the lockdown six years ago. “This is how it is right now,” I’d say to the people who had started meditating with me on Zoom (once we’d figured out how to do that). “This is how it is right now,” I’d say to my daughter as she was yanked from her dream of a life into the dismal captivity of her childhood bedroom. “This is how it is right now,” I’d say to every masked somebody who’d come close enough to hear me, knowing full well that I was saying it to myself. It was the only comfort I could muster for an unyielding, unmanageable, and incomprehensible catastrophe. It’s just temporary, I was reminding myself, although I didn’t quite believe it. Who could believe it? Sometimes temporary seems to last forever.

Infected or not, we had all been felled by a menacing illness that had no boundaries and no end.

Scourges come and go but some scourges come back worse than before. So I’ve been repeating this mantra again. This is how it is right now, and we know why, and we know who, but we do not know when it will come to its crashing demise. With the costs and casualties we are made to bear, with ignorant and untamed presidential impulses inflicting pain and horror worldwide, with every day dawning worse than the one before, we can be excused if we fall into a kind of personal paralysis. We cannot breathe. We cannot move. We cannot hope.

So let’s start by breathing. As you breathe, repeat to yourself, “This is how it is right now. This is only how it is right now.” But look up, look up! Things change. They are changing already. I am standing with you under an open sky.

This is a photo of the sky above the garden this morning.