i don’t pay attention to the
world ending.
it has ended for me
many times
and began again in the morning.

—nayyirah waheed

I usually catch up to them when they are walking ahead of me. 

They do not move quickly—he and she side by side, each with walking sticks, white-haired and old-boned in spring weather.

I live near Hendricks Head, home of Southport Island’s small public beach. Year round, folks stroll loops around our roads, sometimes parking by the beach, sometimes just heading out the front door. We are walking, always returning to our starting point.

Sometimes slowly. Painfully.

I pass the friendly elder couple and we exchange smiles and greetings. I admire them: they are bent from aching, and yet they walk.

Last year at this time, I wrote of spring peepers. Their refrain is here again, sounding hope and life. We’ve done another circuit round the sun—this one unparalleled—and here we are again.

There has been so much hurt. So much anxiety and loss. 

March 20 would have been my daughter’s 32nd birthday. She is no longer here, so I marked the day on my own, walking 32 miles.

Round and round my usual circuit, love whispering in the winds, I walked.

Ever since, my left knee has twinged. Pushing 58 years, my body is not what it once was—recovery is slow, and I wonder if I’ve added a new injury to the catalog. (Time can heal; sometimes it breaks us.)

Our COVID interlude has changed us: we began here and have returned, but we are not the same. The small frogs’ strains sound different to me now: more like a song of gratitude for what remains; a chorus of praise. And my body aches more. 

Yet here I am, and here we are.

As I write, sunlight pours in, warming my back while Schubert plays quietly in the background. It’s a lovely morning, and a lovely day for a walk.

If I am lucky, I will see my stalwart friends walking the loop. 

I will feel some joy, for still, we are here.

The post Here We Are appeared first on Yarrow & Cleat | A Chronicle for Hope, Healing, and Humanity from Boothbay and Beyond.

“I will sing the song of companionship.”

—Walt Whitman

Twilight.

I walk my usual neighborhood loop this autumn eve breathing in the muted air—unseasonably warm, like springtime in November. Calm visits me like an old friend as the blue dusk slips toward closure.

I exhale with half a nation.

I have felt disquieted—more than I had noticed; my knuckles whiter than I knew. To release is to realize. (I had been watching CNN for more than three days straight when I went for my walk, not noting the toll until just then.)

I breathe as I walk. I cry a little too.

In her memoir Blue Nights, Joan Didion defines this time of day as “when the twilights turn long and blue.” She describes the blue night as a period of suspension, when “you think the end of day will never come.” A caesura. Yet days do end, and next ones come—an easy rhythm, our lives shaped as perpetual glide in and out of the gloaming.

As I walk I think of the other half, and the impossible space between us. So much trauma. So much fear. So much anger. It all seems impossible.

And in these blue nights, we walk.

(I learn the night has taken another lonely boy; so many battered souls.)

*****

I am tired, and believe our world could use more kindness. I wish for some gleam of a seemingly impossible dawn.

In an era more divisive than our own, Walt Whitman witnessed much. As a nurse during the Civil War, he knew firsthand of carnage and death; pain and grief; the terror of boys dying.

(“Faces, varieties, postures beyond description, most in obscurity, some of them dead,
Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the smell of ether, the odor of blood”)

Yet to the young and dying, be they friend or foe, he attended kindly, in deed and in word. We have his poetry today as witness. (Poetry cannot save us, but it helps.)

I turn to his words:

“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

So very lovely—such promise of grace.

*****

“I’m struggling with ups and downs of mood swings,” writes a friend I had not heard from for some time.

I invite him for a walk.

The post Impossible Dawn appeared first on Yarrow & Cleat | A Chronicle for Hope, Healing, and Humanity from Boothbay and Beyond.

Author’s Note: as I write this, an election fraught with uncertainty unlike any other is two days away. This week, Maine for the first time had more than 100 new COVID-19 cases on a single day. We are increasingly being told to limit indoor gatherings this winter, a need threatening family gatherings for the holidays, certainly increasing ongoing isolation for those already tired of being alone. The mental strains from the pandemic and our politically divided country weigh on many. It is in this context I offer Brendon’s tale—a story about overcoming obstacles not only through individual grit and persistence, but using the necessary supportive role of community. Brendon’s tale reminds us we can make it through anything, and we must do it together. (PB, 11/1/20)

As with so many who become caught up in the criminal justice system, Brendon McLellan’s problems began with substance use.

“I just loved it,” he says, recalling his marijuana and alcohol use as a teenager. “I had a great childhood, a great family, and lots of opportunity. But I just loved getting high.”

It eventually led to trouble. Expelled from a private school in 10th grade, by senior year Brendon was arrested for Operating Under the Influence. By then, he had added “oxy” (Oxycodone) and cocaine to his habitual weekends of using. Though his driver’s license was suspended, he did not see jail time—that did not come until his mid-20s (he is now 34).

As his addiction grew, Brendon needed more money than he could legally earn. He took to stealing and pawning jewelry from his girlfriend’s family.

“I loved her and I loved her family. I felt terrible about what I was doing, but that addiction drove me right by what’s right and wrong. It was always my loved ones I stole from and hurt the most.”

Such is the way with substance use disorder: the brain’s circuitry is hijacked, and uncontrollable urges relentlessly drive behaviors privileging drug use above all else. Willpower is useless; moral compasses broken.

Brendon’s unwell path eventually led to a 3-year prison sentence, and while incarcerated, he began turning his life around.

“My second day up at Maine State Prison, I ended up seeing a childhood friend from the Boothbay area who was serving time for two murders,” he recalls. “He had changed his life and had been sober five years. That influenced me. I began doing yoga, meditation, working out—that routine was so critical for keeping a healthy attitude. I became part of a community of sobriety up there.”

When coronavirus shut Maine down in March, Brendon had just two months left to serve on his sentence—some say the most important two months for successful transition out of the system.

“COVID hit, and at first it was better than usual. With transport shut down, we had extra guards around and everything ran as scheduled with no cancellations. The first month was great.”

That changed.

“Then we went into a state of emergency and they shut down everything. No visits. No recreation. No programs. We were shut down in our pods.”

Beyond no longer receiving visits from his family and losing out on his daily structured routine, Brendon had the added anxiety of not being able to prepare for release as he had planned to.

“It’s so important for re-entry to make connections with people on the outside, and I couldn’t make those connections,” he says. “Here it is the end of March, and I’m getting out in May. It’s a really crucial time for me to get ready to go out into the world.”

Brendon knew the facts: 70% of individuals released from incarceration commit crimes again, and those suffering from substance use disorder have a significant chance of relapse upon release, leaving them at high risk for death from overdose. He was right to be concerned. Adding to his challenges, Maine was still on pandemic lockdown when he was released in May.

“I went from one quarantine to another,” he says. “To be honest, I was just scared.”

Odds against him, Brendon knew the first thing he needed to do was recreate the programs he’d had access to before COVID-19 shut down the prison system.

“I really needed to find a sober community,” he says. “That’s key to my sobriety.”

Friends in prison had given him a phone number when he left: that of Keith Arvanitis. Keith, a certified peer support specialist and recovery coach, is the Program Coordinator of Boothbay Harbor Peer & Wellness Center.

“The day I got out I got my cell phone, and that day I sent him a text,” says Brendon. “He replied and told me about the support meetings at [Barrett’s Park in] Boothbay.”

Brendon attributes his ongoing sobriety to the meetings he now attends, and the supportive community he has found even in the midst of a pandemic. Life is coming together, and his peers have made all the difference. When he feels cravings or urges, he reaches out.

“Either Keith is texting me, or I’m texting him. Keith lived that lifestyle. He’s been in prison, gotten sober in prison, and wants to help. There’s a comfort level in speaking with someone else who has addiction. I need that to be completely open with somebody.”

As hard as it’s all been, Brendon has managed not just to survive, but to thrive. Some of his success comes from his daily hard work and well-earned resilience, and some from all of those around him holding him up.

“I feel confident now. I’m so fortunate to have my recovery community, and my family still supports me after all these years. I put them through the worst. I even got a puppy last week. I couldn’t take care of myself before, how could I have taken care of a puppy? I’d have had trouble with a goldfish. I don’t want to say I’ve got it, but I’m on the right path.”

He certainly is.

Brendon’s story shows us all that is possible, even as the world seems increasingly impossible.

The post Brendon on Freedom appeared first on Yarrow & Cleat | A Chronicle for Hope, Healing, and Humanity from Boothbay and Beyond.

“In the winter, we must protect ourselves. Look after one another.”

—Ned Stark, Game of Thrones

COVID-19 will lead to this winter being “one of the most difficult times that we’ve experienced in American public health,” according Dr. Robert Redfield, the Director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As cold weather makes outdoor socializing challenging at best, we face the hard choice of hunkering down in relative isolation or having more viral spread and with it an accompanying increase in deaths.

Winter is coming.

On a walk, I see nature is preparing. Red squirrels chase in manic territorial dispute, protecting winter middens. A solitary cricket chirps once, and again. Leaves turn. Spring peepers are settling into muddy bottoms.

Of the original 102 colonists who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620, 45 died during the first winter. In the forced migration in 1838 and 1839 known as The Trail of Tears, 4,000 Cherokee people died, many from harsh winter conditions, especially children and the elderly. During Nazi Germany’s 1941-1942 siege of Leningrad, an average of 100,000 people died monthly from starvation over the peak of winter.

We may take some modest solace in knowing our 2020 challenges are less robust than what others have faced, but there is no getting around it: in the midst of a pandemic, winter is no small thing.

And we are already so weary.

“I have heard it said that winter, too, will pass,” poet Maya Angelou once said. “See, all we have to do is hang on.” (Having experienced and survived childhood trauma, the poet knows something about hanging on.)  

I too have been thinking about hanging on; what that looks like.

I have known grief; I have known trauma. I know weariness does not make wearying things go away. With time and patience, I have learned to be gentle with myself—forgiving. I have felt the gift of compassion; the return that comes with caring and gratitude. I have hung on, and discovered that hanging on requires love.

“Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody anytime,” Angelou has said, in all her earned wisdom. (And with all we know of viruses these days, that tells us that once given, it stays with us forever.)

Winter is coming—a winter of pandemic, and we are already so weary.

And yet we face a winter of hanging on.

I look out my window at sunlight shafts glimmering on leaves falling like gentle snow. On the road along my house, a couple walks by, snug in winter coats. Behind me, the wood stove crackles, heat on my back. I listen to music, alone at home. Melancholy is never far away.

But I keep it at bay, for despite my solitude, I realize I am never alone: Florian’s hand-drawn birthday card propped on my desk (he sends me one each year); photos of my daughters suspended on my refrigerator door (forever moments together); antique toy soldiers marching in timeless parade atop my living room credenza (a gift from my father before he died).

So many tokens—such caring.

And as I have received, I hope too to give; that my love—like the talismans surrounding me, undoing my seclusion—might radiate warmth into others’ winter hollows.

(“Look after one another,” admonishes Ned Stark.)

Winter is coming, and though fear, uncertainty, and isolation rise, so too do love and caring. Alone at home, I am not alone in heart: like hovering angels, friends and family are near—always.

Grace abounds, and—virus versus virus—love wins.

The post Winter Is Coming appeared first on Yarrow & Cleat | A Chronicle for Hope, Healing, and Humanity from Boothbay and Beyond.

“It sounds like a choir, it sounds like angel music.”

—Tom Waits

God’s Chorus of Crickets is a composition by experimental musician Jim Wilson that he says is made exclusively from audio recordings of crickets—one track of chirping recorded at normal speed over another track slowed way down.

The results are positively unearthly.

“I discovered that when I slowed down this recording to various levels, this simple familiar sound began to morph into something very mystic and complex,” says Wilson. “Almost human.”

God’s Chorus of Crickets was first composed in 1994, and has since been heard by millions, moving listeners throughout the world.

“The first time I heard it, I swore I was listening to the Vienna Boys Choir, or the Mormon Tabernacle choir,” says musician Tom Waits, calling the song his favorite piece of music. “The sound is so haunting. I played it for a friend, and he looked at me as if I pulled a Leprechaun out of my pocket.”

Could the story behind Wilson’s ethereal creation possibly be true? As Waits notes, the piece’s vocals seem otherworldly—a far cry from the familiar hum of a late summer eve.

No doubt, crickets sing—or rather, chirp. But only the males, who produce the sound for several different reasons. The most common is to attract females, where a male may switch over from making a loud and steady chirp (a calling chirp) to a quicker and softer one as a female comes nearby (a courting chirp). Males also chirp as an act of aggression toward other males, or as a danger alert. 

To chirp, the cricket rapidly moves one specially adapted wing over another—one with something like a tiny ice scraper on it, the other with a series of wrinkles. When rubbed together, sound emerges; think of running a fingernail along a comb’s teeth, or strumming a guitar pick across strings. Its tempo varies according to weather, and lore has it that a listener can convert cricket chirps to degrees Fahrenheit by counting the number of chirps in 14 seconds and adding 40 (others assert the formula is counting to 15 and adding 37).

Magical.

But are crickets magical enough to be the exclusive source behind God’s Chorus of Crickets?

In a video exploring the origin story behind the composition, the truth of the piece is unmasked. The video demonstrates that while Wilson’s sound does indeed entirely derive from recordings of crickets chirping, the audio is manipulated.

“It is clear the sounds have been digitally sampled and played over a keyboard,” declares the video’s unnamed narrator. “If you look closely at the spectrogram, harmonics have been added to the source recording to make it sound more musical. Jim Wilson recorded crickets in his back yard, slowed them down, but then played them over a keyboard to create the sensation.”

Though the origin story proves to be a myth, that doesn’t discredit a larger truth God’s Chorus of Crickets implies: there is little in this world as lovely as the joyous sound of crickets, their soothing rhythm rising as early autumn dusk falls upon Maine’s fields and woods.

The post God’s Chorus of Crickets appeared first on Yarrow & Cleat | A Chronicle for Hope, Healing, and Humanity from Boothbay and Beyond.

In a pandemic world, music helps.

“I listen to music a lot, and that is so calming,” says Kerry Jackson, a cellist who moved to Boothbay Harbor a little more than a year and a half ago. “Playing music too; it’s so uplifting. I haven’t felt a negativity during COVID.”

Kerry first picked up a violin at age 8, switching to cello 3 years later. She spent her early years playing as part of youth symphonies and for school musicals, and as an adult she most enjoys playing in smaller groups.

“I really love playing in quartets. It’s like having a relationship, you have to listen so carefully—you have to move together. You really get to know each other.”

When she first moved to the area, she did not know anyone, but that quickly changed. In the natural course of settling in, she got to know people. Soon enough, Kerry was practicing once a week with four different fellow musicians and playing cello with the Seacoast Youth & Community Orchestra.

That all came to a sudden halt in March when COVID-19 shutdown the country.

Undeterred, Kerry quickly found a new path for making and sharing music.

“I started playing out on my deck in the evening,” she says. “I’d seen a sign outside the Opera House saying ‘play music outdoors,’ so I did. That kept my music going.”

In addition to giving her neighbors something to appreciate, her deck playing also gave her ideas for the future.

“I have a nice yard and nice deck,” she says. “ I could have three people playing on the deck and people listening down below. I would not have thought of that if it were not for the pandemic.”

Rather than being restrictive, the pandemic has generated new possibilities for Kerry.

“There’s a man who lives across the street and I know one song that he sings. I play on my cello from my deck to try to draw him out to get him to sing. I really want participation. I don’t want to perform, I want people to participate.”

“You feel as one when playing music,” she adds.

Such was the experience Kerry offered dozens one late summer eve on Boothbay Common, as she played Ashokan Farewell as part of 132 Candles, an International Overdose Awareness Day event held August 31.

“The tune is best known from Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary, but I think it fit for that occasion.”

She was right.

Kerry, cello in hand: a sole musician flanked by tables covered with 132 votive candles (symbolic of the number of Mainers who lost their lives to overdose in the second quarter of 2020), Ashokan Farewell’s familiar refrain in ongoing lilt, community members lighting candles as day faded: serenity like a warm blanket on cold toes.

Music—and balm.

Prior to moving to Boothbay Harbor, Kerry lived in West Virginia, where she performed with the Springs Chamber Ensemble. Sample recordings from that time in Kerry’s career can be found here.

The post Kerry on Music appeared first on Yarrow & Cleat | A Chronicle for Hope, Healing, and Humanity from Boothbay and Beyond.

As the newly hired interim minister for the Congregational Church of Boothbay Harbor, Peter Ilgenfritz could never have imagined what was to come: within weeks of his arrival in January 2020, COVID-19 set in. Everything changed, and the church and Peter needed to change with it.

He was up to the challenge. 

The year before coming to Boothbay Harbor, Peter had left a 25-year career as pastor at a church in Seattle for an adventure: a 19,000 mile road trip through the United States. Though leaving was a daunting undertaking, Peter found the strength and courage he needed from—of all things—sailing.

Peter chronicles his journey in his upcoming memoir, Testing the Wind. In it he reflects on change and transition, on life and sailing.

Below is an excerpt from his soon-to-be released book.

A cold blustery day in mid-October 2013. A small wooden sailboat tips in the wind over a white-capped lake. Someone on board is yelling, a frantic cry that echoes across the water, “Are you sure? Are you sure this is alright?”

Sailing’s the last thing I thought I’d ever do. Although I’d spent most of my life near the sea, growing up on the North Shore of suburban Boston in the 1960’s and 70’s and in Seattle for the past two decades, I had never been interested in boats or being out on the water. I’ve never liked tippy things like roller coasters or skateboards. I especially don’t like wind. The howling and flapping of wind, the kind of wind that we’re having today, spitting rain from sheets of gray clouds that scurry across a dark sky.

But a few months before, I’d started thinking about what I might do on my sabbatical that coming winter when I’d have three months away from the church. I thought about all the familiar things I’d done on previous sabbaticals—trips to see family and friends, a study program abroad. And then I dreamt one night of me at the helm of a thirty-foot sailboat in the South Pacific, cresting the waves in a rolling blue sea. Behind me palm trees tossed in the breeze on white sandy beaches. The sun shone bright overhead. Nothing about the dream felt like me or anyone I’d ever wanted to be. Instead, it felt like a dream that had ended up in the wrong person’s imagination. I didn’t tell anyone about it.  

There are journeys in life we would never choose to take, but we do so anyway, because we know that our lives depend on our taking them. In a tippy little boat, on a tiny lake in downtown Seattle, I learned to sail. I discovered a practice that helped me let go of the life I had and discover a new life I’d never imagined. Along the way, I crashed into waves of grief and despair but did not drown. I was tossed by anxiety but did not die. Instead, I discovered parts of myself I’d never dared to embrace. Eventually, I learned what was on the other side of letting go.

Testing the Wind will be available through Ingram Press this fall. You can contact Peter at ilgenfritzpeter@gmail.com, and read more about his work at his website, www.NavigatingThroughChange.com.

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“Long-term isolation produces clinical effects that are similar to those produced by physical torture. It leads to increases in suicide rates, and even mentally healthy individuals find the experience extremely difficult to endure.”

—from Change is Possible: A Case Study of Solitary Confinement Reform In Maine, a 2013 report from the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine

It’s a numbing number: 100,000.

That’s the number of people in solitary confinement in US prisons on any given day. It is also the number of hand-sewn stitches artist Ed Epping uses to embroider the solitary figure depicted in his piece, Isolate.

100,000.

“How do you translate potent data into something that is also visually interesting?” says Ed, recalling his challenge when in 2015 he first began The Corrections Project, an ongoing exploration of overcriminalization and mass imprisonment in the United States. “You have to first catch a viewer’s eye, then—from that—trust curiosity leads them to want to understand what the art is about.”

He’s certainly done that with Isolate, starting with what we see: in jumpsuit-orange, the silhouette of a solitary female figure curled in the fetal position; the word “NUMBER” in prison-stripe black and white branded across the center of a vintage stained canvas cot cover, eerily reminiscent of an animal hide.

The visual alone is compelling.

And then the viewer learns it’s comprised of 100,000 stitches sewn in a basic tally-mark pattern suggesting the marking of time.

Then the story behind those stitches: 100,000 people in solitary confinement, experiencing all the trauma and suffering such incarceration brings.

And then that word: “NUMBER.”

“There’s this double meaning,” notes Ed. “Depending on how you see the word, it can mean a different thing.” An objective reader may focus on the data and see a numeric reference, but “some who have been in the position the work depicts may read it as about numbness. That’s why I am attracted to heteronyms; they don’t decree how they are to be read.”

The Corrections Project is part of a long tradition of art aimed at spurring social change: one thinks of work by such practitioners as Joseph Beuys, Jose Posada, Adrian Piper, or Peggy Diggs (who also happens to be Ed’s wife). In keeping with that tradition, Ed aims to catalyze his audience to care, and to act.

Though his project is oriented toward a social issue, Ed’s focus on imprisonment and its related topics is rooted in personal experience.

“In 1956, when I was 7 years old, my father was sentenced and convicted to 5½ years in prison for defrauding funds from the state of Illinois,” recalls Ed. “He was an accountant, and was clever and manipulative; he knew how to manage numbers.”

Within six months of entering incarceration, Ed’s father became the bookkeeper for the prison warden and within three years he began living in the prison greenhouse, removed from the general prison population.

“It was because he was white,” notes Ed. “And his privilege got passed on to me. While he was imprisoned we never had to leave our upper-middle class home; we never were hungry. We weren’t wealthy, but we were privileged.”

For decades, Ed’s formative childhood experience percolated. It was not until he approached retirement from years of teaching art that he focused on the implications of his privilege, and what he wanted to do about it.

His answer became The Corrections Project.

“Though the project is prompted by my relationship to my father’s prison experience, that’s not what it’s about. I wanted to explore incarceration and over-criminalization more broadly, and look at the populations most impacted by criminal justice abuse: Black and Brown people.”

Grim statistics—such as that Black people are five times more likely to be part of the 2.3 million incarcerated in the U.S. than white people, and Latinx people are twice as likely—are embedded throughout Ed’s project. We see this in pieces such as the Corrections Project Pamphlets, and Blanket, the project’s first undertaking and still a work-in-progress.

Ed believes in his work, and hopes to catch the public’s attention more widely, becoming a pebble in a pond and sending out ripples of change. But The Corrections Project is ultimately an art project. As such, it is a kind of spiritual endeavor—an act of faith, with Ed’s hours in the studio a vigil for the unjustly imprisoned, and each artwork a kind of prayer for the incarcerated.

In this way, Isolate may be interpreted as a gesture of love toward the 100,000 living in daily trauma in rooms no bigger than a closet and deprived of all we think of as humane, each of the 100,000 stitches a “Hail Mary” for another hurting soul.

Ed Epping is an imagist and activist living in New Mexico who taught art at Williams College for 40 years, retiring as the A.D. Falk Professor of Studio Art in 2017. More of his work including The Corrections Project can be seen at his website.

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“Every single one of us could use a little mercy now.”

—from Mercy Now, by Mary Gauthier

On the day of Elisif’s memorial service, after it was over, hundreds in the lobby, I hugged tight every person who came near me (a pre-COVID world).

When she fell, I fell.

More than two years later—channeling her heart; imagining her words—I wrote this:

Take my hand here.
Take my hand in our forever hearts and fall.
We are safer than you know. 
I am fallen.
I am with you and in you and all.
I am pain and love.
I am immense.
I am where fear does not show up.
I am the other side of the fire.
I am your all-white painting: anything but empty.
I am everything is possible, and all is.
The period at the end.
The pure, round dot, full of wonder and surprise.

When your daughter dies, it changes you.

*****

In 2014, the year my daughter died of an overdose, 47,054 others lost their lives in this country the same way she did.

47,054.

It gets worse. In 2018, 67,367 people in the United States died of an overdose—345 of those in Maine. The following year, Maine saw 380 such deaths, a nearly 10% increase. And thus far, for 2020, with COVID creating more isolation and less easy access to help, the state is on track for worse: 127 people are reported to have died of an overdose in the first quarter of 2020 in Maine, and second quarter numbers are projected to be 132.

132.

In three months, just about as many deaths as the state has experienced from the coronavirus pandemic in total.

The opioid epidemic is not new. It has not gone away. It has been with us for years, and it still is. It still is.

*****

Each home. Each heart. Each day. Each breath we take.

COVID. Economic insecurity. Climate change. Social injustice. Physical discomfort and emotional distress. We are in pain.

So many use substances as self-medication—to seek some relief from what is unbearable otherwise; too often, drugs are the solution before they become the problem.

Nobody asks to have substance use disorder.

Those of us who use and those who fall from it are neither weak nor immoral—we just hurt. We are people—you and me. No different, whether or not we have a disease.

We need love.

We do not deserve blame. We ought not be judged. We need not feel shame. We all are better off in a world without stigma. We all deserve mercy.

For me and for you—for Elisif and all—a little mercy now. A little love.

Please.

This piece is written in recognition of International Overdose Awareness Day, held on August 31 each year to raise awareness of overdose and reduce the stigma of drug-related deaths. 132 Candles is an event to mark the day taking place on Boothbay Common in Boothbay, Maine, from 5:45 p.m. to 7:15 p.m.

The post Each Breath appeared first on Yarrow & Cleat | A Chronicle for Hope, Healing, and Humanity from Boothbay and Beyond.

Anyone with a friend or family member in school this fall knows the thorniest element of Maine’s guidance on school reopening: that it “will evolve as additional information and guidance is provided.”

We’ve all lived with “evolving” guidelines since March, so if you’re a parent, administrator, teacher, or student, you know what that means: the path ahead is unclear.

Just ask Fox Elder, a senior at Boothbay Region High School.

“Honestly, I believe we’re going to have more of an issue than last year’s graduating class,” he confesses, reflecting on what may await him and his classmates.

“I can’t see things getting any better in six months—especially with the school year starting everywhere; that’s a whole other new way of exposure all over the country. Honestly, at best it’s going to stay where it’s at. It probably will get worse.”

It’s not surprising that he’s done a lot of thinking about the impact this will have on him.

“I worry about the spring. I worry about applying to college. If it’s still a big issue next year I don’t know if I’ll go to college. I might skip a year—I’ll play it by ear.”

Whether Fox is being pessimistic or simply realistic is hard to know. We as a society are entering uncharted territory: a viral pandemic overlapping a flu season just as weather necessarily drives people indoors; schools in session across the country, perhaps increasing likelihood of spread (as Fox observes).

Experts guess, but nobody knows for sure what is to come.

“It’s going to be an odd year,” he says.

He recalls his shock when everything first changed last March, in the midst of his perfectly ordinary junior year.

“My teachers began saying that maybe we’d not have school the next week. I thought that was crazy talk. I thought: no way, that’s not going to happen.”

But it did.

At first, he was excited at the news that school would be shut down for two weeks as teachers geared up for online education. But his enthusiasm for the unexpected time off faded fast.

“Pretty quickly I realized being home and being in quarantine wasn’t as much fun as I thought it would be,” he says.  “And to be honest, at first we were scared. We’re used to it now, but when it first happened it was a huge thing.”

Like everyone else, Fox acclimated to his new world, doing the best he could with online education, which for him was a challenge.

“Online classes were not a good experience,” he admits. “It was less work, but there was also less help. For certain subjects, like math, I work best with hands-on learning—when I have a teacher telling me what I did right or wrong. Online, there wasn’t time to talk to teachers—you have to send an email and hope it gets answered from a river of emails the teacher is getting every day.”

“I really benefit from the structure school provides,” he adds. “I miss that.”

With a summer job at Boothbay Harbor Oceanside Golf Resort, Fox found a structured routine that had been absent the final months of his junior year. But even with a regular work schedule, Fox feels the impact of lost structure elsewhere. As a member of his school’s cross-country team (“I’m a middle-of-the-packer”), he ordinarily would be taking part in optional pre-season practice with his team; that is not happening this year. As a consequence, he has not been running as much as he would have liked.

Fox admits to being anxious about what school will be like when it begins. With the school planning limited in-person classes (the student body is divided into an “A” and “B” group; each group attends school two days and stay home the other three days), he is unsure he will be able to receive the individual help he thrives on.

“I’ll be taking Physics and AP Calculus. I’m worried especially about falling behind in those classes.”

But Fox is not discouraged despite his fears—he is determined to control what he can, and do his best with what he cannot.

“I’m going to work hard this year and do everything the way I should and just see where it goes,” he says.

At just 17, Fox’s mature attitude is admirable. He is neither loudly complaining about the unfairness of his fate, nor denying the hard reality of what may come for him and his classmates. He names what leaves him unhappy (“it sucks that I can’t hang out with my friends every day after school”), and is accepting of the need to adapt in ongoing ways (“everything is up in the air”).

In essence, Fox is prepared to evolve as additional information and guidance is provided.

Just what Maine’s government is asking of him.

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