{"id":2926,"date":"2022-01-17T17:46:18","date_gmt":"2022-01-18T01:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/?p=2926"},"modified":"2022-01-17T17:46:18","modified_gmt":"2022-01-18T01:46:18","slug":"of-covid-valentines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/2022\/01\/of-covid-valentines\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Covid & Valentines"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Brighten your corner with a card or note<\/p>\n

Why Wait For Valentine\u2019s Day?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was recently invited to send Valentine\u2019s Day cards to people who might not get any. I love that idea and decided to start making some. After all, the grandkids aren\u2019t the only ones who like to mess around with craft supplies, right? Fortunately we are very well supplied with colored pencils and there\u2019s even a couple of boxes of blank cards on nice card stock with matching envelopes. I feel far more creative in the garden than in drawing, but hey, valentines are hardly about great artistry or astonishing creativity. Hearts and flowers, right? I drew a bunch of hearts, added a few flowers and started coloring them in. I\u2019ve been doing one or two a day and finding it almost meditative. It\u2019s actually a bit like using a coloring book, simple and soothing and surprisingly satisfying.<\/p>\n

Soothing is good, because there\u2019s still so much going on that staying serene is taking every trick and tool I\u2019ve got. Local covid rates continue to climb and clinics are so short staffed, they\u2019re basically telling people to stay home and assume you\u2019ve got it if you get symptoms. When our home tests were negative, we learned that most of them don\u2019t pick up omicron well. Again the professional advice was so isolate, hydrate and take over-the-counter analgesics as needed. My daughter and I had similar symptoms; headache, sore throat, muscle aches, little fever bursts, sniffles. So did several neighbors and we all decided to assume that we had covid and stay home. As symptoms came on, I made several batches of soup and that carried us through the days when napping was more important than meal making. Happily those days were few and we\u2019re all on the mend from whatever it was. Actually, I\u2019m thinking we really did catch the virus because of two things: for the past week, I\u2019ve had no appetite, which is pretty unusual, and it hasn\u2019t come back yet. Even more unheard of, the idea of eating anything sweet has been and still is repugnant. That, like so much else that\u2019s going on, is simply unprecedented!<\/p>\n

All Kinds Of Service<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yesterday, our annual community MLK event was presented as an online offering with some amazing speeches, especially a heartfelt and rousing one on service from Doctor Karen A. Johnson, the first Director of Washington State\u2019s recently formed Office of Equity. What a powerhouse of a woman, so smart, so warm, and so genuine. If you get a chance to hear her speak, definitely do. WOW! Afterward we got an online walking tour of the Bainbridge Island Museum Of Art, which is currently featuring some powerful and very moving exhibits. BIMA focuses on local and regional artists, many of national stature, and the staff also puts on a stellar array of online panels and programs with an equity emphasis. Listening and watching, I was thinking about the way that art has become such an active and interactive medium with strong influences way beyond the shelter of academia. Our local wonder woman, Akuyea Karen Vargas, just won a Governor\u2019s Luminary Award for decades of work with underserved youth, often using art as a tool for self expression, and as deep, healing therapy for wounded hearts and spirits.<\/p>\n

Several of the artists in yesterday\u2019s presentation mentioned that they consider their art as equity work and as a gift to the beloved community. Many of the keynote speakers noted that, for activists, MLK day is a day ON, not a day off, a time to honor MLK\u2019s legacy in action as well as words. As Dr. King said, \u201cEverybody can be great, because anybody can serve.\u201d Sometimes the idea of service may seem intimidating, but really, service comes in all shapes and sizes. Though we are still in quarantine, I was able to pass along a big bag of warm hat and scarves and mitts made by the Senior center knitting group, to be offered along with warm meals and hot drinks to homeless people. We\u2019ve been piling them up for two year, as local agencies weren\u2019t accepting in-kind contributions, so there will be a lot of warmer heads and hands today, covid or no covid.<\/p>\n

Little Gifts, Big Impact<\/strong><\/p>\n

If knitted hats can be considered a gift of service, I suppose even Valentine\u2019s Day cards might be as well. In fact, I know they can, because during the earlier pandemic lockdown time, writing notes and cards to shut-in elders clearly made a big difference to their feelings of isolation and anxiety. Sometime if I couldn\u2019t think of anything new or clever to say, I\u2019d cut out jokes or pictures of beautiful gardens from magazines and paste them into a card with a few words, like, \u201cWish we could be walking in this lovely garden\u201d or \u201cThis joke is so bad it made me snort tea through my nose.\u201d You know, uplifting thoughts.<\/p>\n

As the lethargy of our mystery illness slowly ebbs, I\u2019m realizing that having a week absolutely off was something I\u2019d really like to try again when I didn\u2019t feel like napping all day. I\u2019ve never been big on vacations, and at this stage of life, my home, my garden, my family and my community supply pretty much everything I want. However, I do have a tendency to jump in and do what seems to need doing and sometimes that means I\u2019m putting more on my plate than I can actually handle. Maybe it\u2019s time to see that my plate isn\u2019t as large as it used to be? Maybe it’s time to slow down a bit and make space for someone else to jump in? Maybe only doing a little is plenty now? I\u2019ve been remembering a dear Quaker neighbor from my childhood: I loved to visit her, because she was always calm and welcoming and actually listened. When I would pour out my fears and concerns about the world (this was during the civil rights movement, when the evening news was horrifying), she would often say, \u201cNone of us can solve everything, but we can all brighten our corner.\u201d Amen, sister!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Brighten your corner with a card or note Why Wait For Valentine\u2019s Day? I was recently invited to send Valentine\u2019s Day cards to people who might not get any. I love that idea and decided to start making some. After … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1884,2315,1153,2053,182],"tags":[2339,2337,2338],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1lB7f-Lc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2926"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2930,"href":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2926\/revisions\/2930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.loghouseplants.com\/blogs\/greengardening\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}