Times of Corona

Botanical explosions on our kitchen table.

Suddenly we have all been thrust into a sweeping wave of incredibly disorienting and troubling times. As commerce, work and public life in Germany are slowing to a complete standstill, the air is thick with anxiety.

 For my own sanity, I’m attempting to pick the positive details out of this situation, and I’d like to share a few of my thoughts with you today. This crisis, with all its threatening fear and floundering insecurity, is also a sort of retreat, a detox from the daily input overload and stress out there.

 Hundreds of outwardly successful people pay good money for retreats to avoid mental breakdowns, confining themselves to some remote mountain village to meditate for days and limit their social contacts. Now, we’re being presented with this opportunity for free. I know that I could get lost in an ocean of fear and anxiety – a future fear that is all the more scary because it is vague and unspecific. I could also choose to train myself in trust, in becoming centered, in focusing on our shared humanity and gaining a larger perspective of our world, where our daily squabbles seem so trivial and useless.

 We humans are amazing creatures. I believe that we have the unique ability to hold paradoxes in our mind, and this balance of seemingly irreconcilable opposites is exactly that place where our humanity flourishes. It’s that moment of inner freedom, where we are detached enough not to succumb to self-pity and emotional enough to feel real empathy, where we hold birth and death, joy and sorrow in one and the same space, with grace and dignity and (self-)love. This is my ambition for these upcoming weeks: practising to hold that difficulty within myself, being a witness, becoming really comfortable with paradoxes.

 One of the most unsettling questions that is always posed by a real emergency is the question of relevance. Is what I do actually important? Is my work necessary for our society to survive and flourish? How is it relevant in a crisis? To answer that question for myself I have to be able to reconcile another paradox: my life, and what I do with it, is both impermanent and forever. We all are unimportant specks of dust in the universe and our lives are over in the blink of an eye, yet, at the same time, our actions have consequences in the here and now, and there are people who care about us deeply and our moved by us.

 So I find myself thinking what matters most to me. Working for myself. Rediscovering that deep joy I feel when I am creating something, composing a piece of writing, painting a watercolour, imagining a sculpture or an intricate piece of jewellery. Cooking. Reading. Sharing stories around our kitchen table. Building an empire, a castle of imaginative output, that empowers people to learn to use their own creative imagination again.

 Bearing all these thoughts in mind, this is what I am going to do (since all events such as craft shows, fairs, symposiums and exhibitions have been cancelled for the next couple of months):

 1.     I will draw as much as I can, trying to regain that spontaneity I had in my drawings as a child, back when drawing was my story-telling tool, before I became aware that my work could be judged by people. I will create really large spreads of tangled botanical fantasies and imaginary paradise gardens.

2.     I will work on my online shop, which is now finally live on my website, to tell stories with my work and spread small slithers of joyful hope in the world.

3.     I will establish a more regular blogging practice than I have had so far, publishing something, even if it’s only a short piece, every Friday, in an attempt to become a better writer and storyteller.

4.     I will read all the books on my reading pile (reading Seven Fry’s wonderful retelling of Greek mythology at the moment, and Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, with slithers of Kafka in between).

5.     I will design outrageous jewellery pieces with an unlimited imaginary budget.

6.     I will design enamelled, jewelled, vertical-garden like botanical installations.

7.     I will go for a walk every day, if I can, and watch nature wake up to spring.

8.     I will pay more attention to my yoga practice and attempt to centre myself in my body, in the here and now.

9.     I will plan future exhibitions and apply for shows later in the year or next year, since life will go on eventually.

10.  I will have long conversations with people and talk about things that matter.

11. I will NOT worry about money now. I will not obsess about not being able to pay my bills in August because life is tough now. It’s just money, just numbers. Imagine this for a moment: what if the construct of money lost its value to us? What worth does money actually have, once we strip it of its meaning? Money is just a place-holder for real value. What value should we imagine instead? Things like kindness, nourishing food, good quality useful everyday things, hand-made beautiful objects, books and the treasures they contain, good quality content on the internet, music, art, films, poetry, games, laughter, our own time.

 In this spirit I hope that all of you are doing well, that you can use this time to do all the things you ever wanted, that you can stay curious without becoming overwhelmed, and that you can take care of yourself and your loved ones.