How the Pandemic Has Taught Us to Play

For over a year now, the world has been more topsy-turvy than usual. In addition to wars, famine, ethnic cleansing and political turmoil, we’ve all had a pandemic to face together. We’ve been told to stay inside, don’t visit your friends or family, wash your hands. And we haven’t even gotten to see people’s faces behind those masks! It’s been a year of isolation, depression and uncertainty.

Many people here in our little Oklahoma town lost their jobs or worked from home. Students at the local college were forced to stay in their tiny dorm rooms; some could no longer afford their dorms, so they had to go home or sleep on friends’ couches. The streets of our town were quieter. Churches shut down or streamed online services.

But God blessed us with some of the most beautiful weather I can ever remember witnessing in Oklahoma. And people went outside.

We live near the city park. As I worked from home each day, I looked out the window and saw folks outdoors. People walked. People ran. People gave each other six feet of distance on the path, but waved or loudly greeted one another. People watched birds. People had picnics.

As spring danced through the trees and breathed on the earth, people were outdoors to get caught up in her magic. As summer unfurled her banner in a riot of hot, golden color, people went outside to witness it. As fall shyly painted the leaves in vivid autumnal shades, people watched her at work. As winter crafted a record snowfall, people plowed through the drifts to build snowmen.

We’ve fooled ourselves by thinking we have conquered Nature. We live in our air-conditioned houses, work in our sealed-up offices, and drive in our comfortable cars. It’s possible to stay out of the weather for days on end. But when we grow sick of our houses – when we have no office to go to – when there is nowhere to drive – God reminds us of one of His greatest resources: Nature.

“I’m bored, Mom.” “Then go play outside.”
“Gym’s closed… I think I’ll go for a run.”
“Let’s grab some food and sit at a picnic table.”
“I harvested the first veggie from my garden!”
“We got 10,000 steps today at the park!”
“Did you see that bird?”

Yes, the pandemic has made the world more topsy-turvy than usual. It has taken lives and changed many others. As churches tentatively meet again or continue to stream online, congregations pray for healing in the world. Everyone wonders what will come next.

It has been one year. Once again, spring is stretching her legs to begin the dance of life. Because of the pandemic, people have discovered the joy of watching Nature at her work. The pandemic has taught us how to play.

Will we continue playing this year, and the next, and the year after that? I pray it will be so.

The Song of a Ouachita Summer

Some people hear “Oklahoma” and think of windswept clay deserts, black mesas, cowboy plains. That’s accurate, but that’s the west part of the state. The southeast part has the Ouachita mountains. That’s where my childhood home is. Let’s go for a drive.

Summertime at home is a humid puddle of color and sound. When you pull into our driveway, you sink into row upon row of trees receding down the hillside. You’ll notice the pines first – they are tall and slender and gray, and their dark green needles whisper in the wind far above the forest floor. Next is the gnarled oaks, catching the eye with twisted black trunks and leaves of shining green.

The hickories grab your attention last, but they might hold it the longest. They are modest trees, but they have a secret. Their large leaves can catch the sunshine and turn into golden lamps that shimmer in the breeze. The hickories are the dancing trees. They dance to birdsong and cicadas.

The birdsong is sweet, but the cicadas’ blasting yet rhythmic screech is an acquired taste.

If we go down the hill, we’ll pop out of the woods and into the neighbor’s pasture. It’s okay – he gave us permission to play on his land when we were kids. The pasture is a mess of green and brown. Trees don’t block the sun here. It pours down with skin-tingling might.

Grasshoppers are the pasture’s music. Our ears tickle as the locusts flick and rasp through the brush.

Let’s stay in the shade. Here on the fringe of the pasture, wild blackberries grow in prickly clumps. Be careful as you pick them; red wasps like to drift lazily from berry to berry. It’s worth the risk though, since these are the tartest, juiciest berries ever warmed by the sun. You can nibble on your hard-earned treasures as you wander beside the barbed wire fence.

The hot grass crunches beneath your feet.

I know where the wild roses grow. Come here, I’ll show you. You have to dodge that cedar tree and pull this mess of briars aside… And look, there it is, a waterfall of rose vines cascading down from a cedar branch. They are such delicate, light pink blooms that even the bees buzz carefully among them. The ground below is covered with tiny purple dots called bluet flowers. This little corner smells like paradise.

Squirrels chitter here, and unseen robins crackle through the underbrush in search of tasty bugs.

We can sit in this nook with a good view across the pasture. Those dark blue waves above the treetops are the foothills of the Ouachita mountains. They are the singing hills, singing the kind of music you feel rather than hear, but which you think you could hear if you listened hard enough. They were a lullaby in my childhood; a comforting croon in my little sorrows; a beckoning call in my teenage years; a welcome chorus on my returns from college.

When I became a Christian, I learned that these hills had never been singing to me, but to their Creator. Through their beauty and life, color and sound, they worshiped God better than I ever could. They taught me the song of Psalm 96:11-12:

“Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it! Let the field exult, and everything in it! Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy.”

And that’s the song the Ouachita summer sings.

The Oklahoma Meadows, in Pictures

This weekend, my fiance and I thought we would get many tasks done, lots of wedding planning, maybe a new cell phone for me – because y’all, I still have a slider phone of the QWERTY keyboard variety. But alas, it was not to be. We didn’t get anything done, so we recovered by watching a movie and eating off-brand boxed macaroni and cheese.

However! Some good friends of ours got married on Saturday. The wedding was at the groom’s parents’ ranch, where guests perched on hay bales and the reception was located in an impeccably rustic-themed barn. I had first met the bride three years ago; a group of college students gathered several times a week on campus to pray, sing and worship together. It was a special group of God-loving people, and many of those friends came to the wedding this weekend. It was a mini reunion in an autumnal Oklahoma farmyard.

The route to the wedding took us through such pretty countryside that my fiance and I went for a leisurely drive the following afternoon to snap some photos. Allow me to take you on a tour of central Oklahoma in the fall.

The perks of a country drive are that you can drive 10 miles an hour to catch a good picture and not be tailgated, because nobody is behind you to tailgate.

This adorable little barn is probably full of rats, mold and fire hazards. But it presented a photographic rural paradise.

Did I mention my sweet fiance got me flowers for the first time? I had told him he didn’t need to buy me flowers; but he did anyway, and it gave my heart the little thrill that I never expected. 🙂

I have a really exciting blog post in the making! But in the meantime, this has been a short jaunt through some of my favorite moments this past week or so.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Laptops and Luna Wings

There is a place where the sidewalk ends/ And before the street begins/ And there the grass grows soft and white/ And there the sun burns crimson bright/ And there the moon-bird rests from his flight/ To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black/ And the dark street winds and bends/ Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow/ We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow/ And watch where the chalk-white arrows go/ To the place where the sidewalk ends… – Shel Silverstein, “Where the Sidewalk Ends”

I work in a great office building. It’s got a restaurant, a gym with convenient hours, and break rooms that smell like hot coffee and kind souls. We get stand-up desks to combat the melting of our minds and bodies as we stare at computer screens for eight hours daily. Some people stand. Most people don’t.

It’s easy to get sucked into the screen, even on breaks. There’s a certain seduction about screens that draws people in. For me, that seduction is mental lethargy – the sweet release of control so I can wallow in intellectual laziness. I can feel it when my brain starts to shut down and automatically scan the news feed, the celebrity article, the Wikipedia page. My body grows cold because I stop moving even a little bit. It’s like falling asleep but worse, because when I’m asleep, my brain is still working to recover from the day and to process those crazy dreams I’m having. Falling into screen-sleep is like being frozen from my mind outward.

I grew up in the woods, so my favorite part of my workplace is the outside part: the parking lots and the walking trail/back road to the office. I try to take a break every day and go wander. We’re situated on a hilltop in the middle of a forest, so the sidewalk really does end at the edge of the untamed tangle of shrubs, vines and trees that surround our office. I always end up walking on the edge of the asphalt so I can watch the woods and the wild things.

I’ve seen two cats fall out of a treetop, entangled in combat. I’ve watched another cat climb up a tree trunk, hotly pursued by an irate mama raccoon and her five peppy babies. I’ve found where the road runners nest. I’ve helped one-legged crickets hop over the curb. I’ve discovered the spider webs on a drizzly day, draped in tiny jewels of mist and hanging in the air like portals to another world. Today I found a pearly pink snail shell and the delicate green wings of a luna moth.

All without even stepping foot off the asphalt. During these short fifteen minutes off the screen, my brain warms back up to life. I’m not off the pavement – but I can still “watch where the chalk-white arrows go.”

Let’s take advantage of the free moments that we are offered. We can stay inside and watch the screen and feel our brains and bodies freeze. Or we can get outside in the open air and see what treasures await us there.

For professional opinions on screens and how to keep them from dominating the world one cat video at a time, check out Psychology Today’s article “10 Ways to Protect the Brain from Daily Screen Time.” *cough cough going outside is #1 cough excuse me* And Business Insider reports that going outside can eliminate fatigue and increase creative capacity, along with a host of other benefits.

Get learned. Stay woke. Smell that peppermint wind.