Here in the UK, we are now in our 13th week of lockdown. Some easing of lockdown rules have begun, but for our family, things don’t look much different than they did when this all started. Some students have gone back to school, but all of my kids have not fallen into any of the required categories - and thus remain at home.

Whilst I typically enjoy - cherish even - this closeness my family is experiencing, I have certainly had my moments…those times when my mind begins wandering and tries to makes sense and forge control out of all this mess and chaos that the world has thrown at us…at all of us.

But I’ve found myself thinking, “What if in the midst of waiting, I allow my mind to wonder, instead of wander?” The wandering leads to more uncertainty, fear, anxiety, and waste. The wondering leads to possibility, to exploration, to a forced intentionality of finding the good that’s buried in the darkness.

My friend Emily, former editor at The Magnolia Journal, recently penned these words back in April, and I feel they are so poignant:

I endure April showers
based on the presupposition,
the promissory note, that,
May will, in fact bloom.
That hope will, indeed, flower.

These rains and tears and storms will pass.
They always have, they always do.
Life will hasten from death again like
clockwork.

Dormant now, I lie in wait.
Angry skies have the populace stuck inside.
Day after day of rain delays - clouds groaning,
humanity moaning.

Until that day, not yet, not soon
but coming: a silver lined sunny sky.
An all clear.

And a siren stampede of color-forms
tumbling along down the boulevards,
permeating the parks.
Plants and people unearthed at long last
in all their technicolor finery.

- e. paben*

There is expectancy penned in this poetry. Imagination of what could be. A visualization of good coming after, and even because of, the storms. The “technicolor finery” that is a wondrous blend of those who hoped and dreamed.

*printed with permission