Tonic for My Annual Pox. Issue 16

"If you do not know how to be still, you can only be ill, there is no other way. You may have different names for your illness". Sadhguru

Once again the annual pox of September is upon us. After summer's languorous permissions, the season's end marks the return to social obligations, long ignored household chores, a loaded professional calendar, and more recently for me, a new community leadership role and demands of the Fall art season.

I have been so slammed, so crushed, so so so busy. You? 2022's MOST BUSY medal goes to.....EVERYONE. 

September has been a mad incoherent dash.

And then mid race I came down with covid, a repeat experience. I felt so terrible, so awful, and as I rearranged and cancelled plans, so inadequate. Achy, cranky and disconsolate, I took to my lonely sequestered bed for a mid afternoon nap. 

Awakened some hours later by a rustle of wind and the sound of birds, I experienced an utter absence of meaningful thought or any sense of imperative. Despite my irksome physical symptoms, in the suspended space between sleep and awake, I felt at peace. I was still. 

"If you do not know how to be still, you can only be ill, there is no other way. You may have different names for your illness".

And so it would appear covid is a tonic as much as illness for my disease called "busy". With contagion has come quarantine and a forced timeout, an opportunity to find the tranquility in motionless.

I hope to never recover.