Swimming Lessons

It’s a beautiful sunny morning in Henderson corner today, and as I begin my morning routine of sipping coffee and scrolling through the news and social media, another routine, this one newer, begins to unfold inside my body. As the headlines scroll by and the stats begin to bounce around in my head, my stomach flops and my chest tightens, I feel an urge to flee this moment and so I do. I stand up and inspect the tables, window sills, and counter tops of my home, which are all covered in seedlings of various sizes. Vegetables, herbs, flowers, each needing a little of my attention and care. I poke my finger into the soil to feel which need water and check to see if I’ve made any progress against the thin mould that I’ve been battling this week. I pinch off the suckers that are growing in the armpits of my tomato branches, I make a few strategic moves to ensure each plant is getting their share of sunshine. By the time I’m done my rounds my stomach has loosened and my flight instinct has deactivated. I make myself some breakfast and return to my computer, ready to absorb what I need and ignore what I don’t. My experience on the internet is not what it was six weeks ago, yes there is the overwhelming presence of the pandemic everywhere I look, but there is something else too. Something you’ve probably noticed.

Like many people, I have seen an increase in the number of artisan loaves and seedlings popping up in my feed lately. Home cooking is up for obvious reasons, but alongside that content there is a trend of more traditional, long term food techniques. People are seeking sourdough starters and kombucha scobies, making cheese, or in my case, regrowing the stumps of their old food. There are online sourdough workshops and people are sharing articles about victory gardens. Why the sudden interest in old fashioned hobbies?

The urge to learn or perfect practical skills in the midst of an emergency makes sense, we’ve been inundated with stories of the apocalypse in popular culture for generations and so much of the language of this moment feels like the time has come to abandon the convenient trappings of modern life, separate into our camps and begin the new world. OK, maybe not quite, but it does feel like we are dipping our toes into the water of something that is simultaneously new and old and I don’t think it’s just because we’re bored at home.

Some may be acting out of necessity, we’re not going to the grocery store every other day and there’s legitimate concern over food shortages in many places. Many people are at home when they would normally be at work, maybe they’re bored or maybe they’re trying things they’ve always wished they had time for. Many have kids to entertain, kids that are usually at school or daycare and are suddenly at home and eating more. There are people who have lost some or all of their income and are trying to learn how to stretch their budget further out of necessity. This virus has woken some up to the realities of the climate crisis and the insecurity of our systems, and they suddenly feel pressure to change the way they live and the way they eat. There is also the fact that there is simply less content available for most people to post, perhaps your friends have always been master bakers but until now had chosen to post their vacation photos, hitting the town outfits, or kids’ sports victories.

There are any number of practical explanations for the change in your social media content, and I’m sure a person could dissect their own social circle quite easily, but it’s interesting to me that this experience seems to be somewhat universal in the western world. Around the same time I started noticing this trend in my own Instagram and Facebook feeds, I started seeing a Twitter meme form around it. Almost no one I follow on Twitter is anywhere near my physical or socioeconomic location, and yet here they were, describing the same phenomenon in their feeds that I was seeing in mine. Some took the form of good natured teasing, and some were outright mocking the trend. I also started to see, and occasionally participate in, some defence of these new hobbies. I felt immediately protective of all the amateur bakers and cosplay farmers out there, because I think the pursuit of a more connected, simple, and sustainable life is a noble one, but there was something else too, something deeper, something familiar.

My husband and I had a ten year battle with unexplained infertility, we are past the worst of it and for the most part enjoy an exceptionally happy life, but this particular pain never fully goes away and no one comes out of that journey without permanent scarring. Since the start of this pandemic, my old scars have been tingling. I am intimately familiar with grief, I have been adrift in it for a decade, sometimes nearly drowning, sometimes peacefully floating, but never on dry land. As early as the second week of the large scale societal shut down, I started to see and feel grief in my friends, my family, and in strangers on the internet. Nebulous and intangible grief that brought back bad memories and activated well worn neural pathways.

Most adults have experienced some form of grief in their lives, and of course there are people dealing with more concrete grief at this moment. People whose loved ones have died or are dying of this terrible illness. I am not speaking about that kind of grief, although my heart breaks when I think about all that loss.

The kind of grief we’re experiencing as a society has no specific source, and therefore no recognizable rituals attached. Those of us living through this moment are mourning the sudden loss of the small things that make up our world, as well as potential loss that is almost limitless. When we think of grief we often think of a loved one dying, when that happens there are protocols: kind messages, phone calls, people drop off food and offer help with the household chores. We share photos, recall happy memories, and cherish personal items. These protocols are hard to apply to the type of grief we’re experiencing now, even if we could get together, we can’t hold a funeral for a music festival, high school graduation, or missing out on your niece’s first words. You can’t make a pre-emptive memorial Facebook page for all the people you are worried won’t survive this pandemic, or the suffering of strangers all over the world. This grieving is lonely and vague and can sometimes feel unimportant or even indulgent. This grief is not an event, but it is very real. It can be overwhelming, it can feel like the air you breathe, the ground underfoot.

I know this grief and it has taught me many hard lessons. It has taught me that you must mourn for things that did not happen, for gatherings, milestones, experiences and accomplishments that filled your vision of the future and have now evaporated. I learned that you can’t go around it, you have to go through it. Reach out to people and tell them what you’re afraid of and what you’re missing, name your losses as well as your worst fears. Tend to your grief, say it out loud, write it down, sit and focus on it. Cry. I see people learning this lesson already, I am proud of my friends who name their fears and sorrow in private and inspired by people who do it publicly. I survived my grief through the love and support of my partner and my family, through attention to my body and mind, and through sheer endurance. So what does all this have to do with sourdough starters?

Throughout the worst period of my grief I began to garden, to grow food and flowers and herbs. I covered the surfaces of my house with tiny pots of soil and gently coaxed plants out of them, towards the sun, until they were strong enough to go outside. I learned to ferment food and became obsessed with it, I filled crocks around my home with sauerkraut, kimchi, curtido, and pickles and I lovingly tended to the rotting vegetables within.

These projects gave me a place to put my love, something to care and take responsibility for, something to nurture and protect. The world feels so dangerous right now, and instead of hunkered down with the people we care about, we are physically separate from them, unable to touch or protect them. We are worried for our parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, uncles, children, friends, lovers, everyone outside of our reach feels vulnerable and many of us feel helpless. The problem feels so big and is growing so fast that it’s hard to imagine this will ever end. Planting a seed is an act of love and hope. Feeding a sourdough starter is an act of nurturing.

In these news skills I found something that required focus and attention. Something immediate that my anxiety could not drown out. The pandemic is everywhere all at once, but for many of us it’s not happening directly to us yet. There’s a cacophony of statistics, graphs, projections, new laws, public health orders, symptom check lists, and societal ills being explored everywhere you look. Massaging salt into cabbage or kneading bread require your physical presence, they are meditations that quiet the noise, bring you into the present, however temporarily.

Many people who have experienced infertility will tell you that they felt a lack of control over their health and future. Even if we take every vitamin, monitor our temperature religiously, spend every dollar we have, we might (and I did) end up with nothing to show for it but scars and debt. This pandemic has an element of personal responsibility that feels very familiar to me, we are all doing our part to “flatten the curve”, we are reading every article, sewing masks, washing our hands, and we should continue to do these things, but the virus may still take our loved ones, overwhelm our hospitals, or destroy our economy. Growing our own food or learning to bake bread with wild yeast are acts of self-reliance and discipline. We cannot control the world around us, but we can learn to make a perfect loaf of bread. Bread and plants respond to your efforts, if you follow the instructions and use the right ingredients and equipment, you can improve your loaf or grow a better tomato. These hobbies offer milestones and accomplishments in a moment when we are re-evaluating our priorities and stalled in our plan making.

My grief is not gone, I will always be afloat in this ocean, but I have become a very good swimmer. People everywhere are falling into this dark cold water and what I see in these new commitments to sourdough and kimchi is people coping. This is not simple Instagram thirst, this is people managing their grief, people coping with their reality in productive and therapeutic ways. I don’t know if or how we’re going to survive this virus, but I know that we can survive this grief, because we have to. The sea of grief is our home for the foreseeable future; cry your tears, name your fears, find something you love and tend to it, that is how you learn to swim.