I’m continuing my COVID supplement to The Book of Waking Up. If you’d like to support this project, signup for my Substack. Special thanks today to Susanjen who signed up as a yearly $65 subscriber!

9. The Howl of Pandemic Pain

The dark days have set in, no matter what the sunshine outside might claim. These are the days that roll on and on, wind humming like cellos. No one touching. No hospitable gatherings at common tables. No eye-meets-eye, smile-meets-smile happy hours. The night creeps up, gives space for a moon swollen with sadness. Even dreams have become an exercise in interpreting grief.

Last night, at 8:00, the city of Fayetteville gathered outside their homes and howled like a mad pack of wolves. "What is the purpose?,” I asked Amber as we stepped outside. “You don’t need a purpose to howl,” she said. And so, we gathered on our front porch and joined the primal chorus. It was a moment of madness, but it sounded like connection. Something in the base of my brain released, too. An inkling? A pre-civilized notion?

Ah, I get it. We were made for collective song, collective lament.

The ache is more real than ever these days, though some will not give voice to it. Some pretend they’re not covered in the tar of grief and push deeper into Zoom meetings or Leadership Conferences or statistical analysis or whatever. Some push the howl back with the misuse of what I’ve called the Stuff of Earth, the things originally created by God to draw us into the Divine Love—work, wine, sex. Some use words like lines of coke: Just one more bump and we’ll be on the other side of all this hurt. No matter how we try to mute the pain, the ache is the ache.

On Monday, I wrote of the emotional pain, how it underlies the rise in addiction in this pandemic age. But before I move further into the nexus of the pandemic pain and the rise in addiction, bad habits, or compulsive behavior, allow me a brief intermission to review the data. Review with me.

A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found nearly 72% of Americans claim their lives have been disrupted by the Coronavirus outbreak. More than 39% claim they’ve suffered some personal economic impact from this New Demon. (I’m among that demographic, as are many of you.) 45% of adults say the pandemic has affected their mental health, up from 32% in early March. Almost 20% claim the pandemic has had a “major impact” on their mental health. How do percentages translate to actual human impact? Consider the percentages in terms of individual experience and a truer picture forms:

235,440,000 of our children, spouses, parents, and friends have experienced life disruption,
127,530,000 working folks have suffered an economic impact,
147,150,000 members of your family claim their mental health has been impacted, and of those, 65,400,000 American souls say it’s had a major impact.

See? This pandemic isn’t just bringing physical death; it’s brought the hellfire of emotional pain with it. It’s buried a howl in all of us. We can let it out, or try to silence it. But howls are unwieldy things. They’ll come screaming out one way or another.

To Be Continued…

Join me tomorrow (and for the foreseeable future) as I continue my Pandemic Supplement to The Book of Waking Up. And if you haven’t grabbed a copy of The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life, grab a copy. And yes, Amazon has slowed down book shipments, so considering purchasing it from Bookish, Fort Smith or grabbing a digital copy for Kindle or Nook.