Spring in a New Normal
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Kerri Connor, author of several titles, including Wake, Bake & Meditate and the new 420 Meditations.
At this time last year, we had been in quarantine about a month. I knew then it would be quite a while before things would return to “normal.” Since then, our world has gone through many changes. We have had to learn to adjust and create new, different, sometimes better, ways of doing things we were used to doing in certain ways.
While there is so much talk about getting back to normal, I have found the old normal simply doesn’t work for me anymore. Sure, there are some parts of it I really do miss (hugs come to mind immediately). But some of the changes we have made we will gladly continue, such as supporting our locally owned restaurants far more than we did previously and hosting drive-in movies on our garage door complete with sound broadcast over car radios. If I still must go out, I will wear one of the many stylish masks I invested in to keep those around me safe.
The Pagan group I run, The Gathering Grove, decided during the pandemic that, after 17 years, it was time for us to become official, and so the paperwork for legal status was started. This has set us on a path of regular weekly classes and far more events than we had before.
Projects that had been piling up, along with my ever expanding To Dd lists, were completed, and cut way down. Things on my five-year check-off list are already done. I am currently working on my third book during this break from the outer world. I finished my entire Netflix queue.
Since I have several autoimmune diseases and I am a lifetime cancer patient, I am on several waiting lists for the vaccine. Rollout in my county has been particularly slow. But I know that I will get one sooner or later, and when I do, I will be ready to rejoin the outer world while still demanding a bit of personal space in social situations.
As I watch the piled-up snow from several snowstorms finally melting off, and see patches of grass appear, I know that spring is truly on its way and that this year particularly, it brings with it the promise of new life. The buds on the trees are getting ready to burst. The days are growing longer. The birds are returning. The pond is filling with all the runoff water and soon we will start scouting out frog eggs to watch the miracle of life continue even more.
Go into this spring, this season of rebirth, with a new appreciation for life. Many have lost family and friends to the virus over the past year, my family included, and though they won’t be stepping into the new normal with us, we will always carry them in our hearts. We cannot go back to the normal we once had, but there is a new, better normal just over the horizon.
Our thanks to Kerri for her guest post! For more from Kerri Connor, read her article “Magical Herbal Blends Are Smoking Hot: 5 Blend Recipes.”
