I ended last year with COVID. It wasn’t as bad as the first time I’d gotten it back in April 2020 – then, we absolutely should have gone to a hospital, but the world was, as you may recall, in a death spiral. Under no circumstances were we to leave our home unless one of us, literally, was dying. (I don’t remember five days or so, only that I was constantly exhausted and moving back between the couch and the bed. Dragon says I took care of both of us because they were even more out of it than I was.) This time, the late 2023 version, wasn’t quite as bad. It was still unpleasant. Paxlovid makes your mouth taste like a rusted car battery. There was one night I got no sleep because of a persistent drip-drip down the back of my throat met with a cough every minute or so. And then the corner of our kitchen ceiling flooded and got all over the countertops, cabinets, and floor. (The flood didn’t have anything to do with COVID, but it sure was part of the experience.

I don’t believe in a universe that punishes people to make a point or send a sign. I believe signs are often a spiritual Rorschach test for ourselves and indicate our own willingness to trust and ability to notice patterns. This is still holy and rightful in its way, but it’s a different flavor of understanding the cause and effect of the numinous. That said, getting sick with Dragon made me slow down and take a break. It made me reevaluate my priorities. And even though COVID is no walk in the park, it was still time off work from a job that’s been slowly draining me for months. Despite the hacking coughs, fevers, chills, and Paxlovid mouth, it was still an opportunity to figure out another path ahead. The narrative irony of having talked to a dear friend of mine (s/o to Rev. Byron Tyler Coles who ministered my wedding!) about my ongoing struggle with/toward/about priesthood and not feeling like I had enough time and space in my life to figure it out, and then immediately, within days, getting a two-week “vacation” I couldn’t refuse… well. The universe may not pull every string, but it sure has a funny sense of humor.

I spent a lot of time diving into herbalism, a growing passion of mine, through herbal tea blends to help manage some symptoms. I read books. I played video games. I watched several seasons of Top Chef. I started a very late celebration of Sunwait, modified to a period of days rather than weeks before the solstice. I struggled with feeling useless, like I wasn’t being productive enough on my “break.” As though I needed to produce anything while living with COVID-19. But that mentality has always plagued my periods of rest, which never turn out to be that restful. And while I was sick, I had nowhere to go to escape my thoughts.

I’m glad to be here. I’m trying to remind myself that hesitation, doubt, guilt, shame, these are all part of me and therefore still holy and deserving of respect. There’s no point I will be Done Enough (with chores, with work, with health and disability, with social justice, with being a good person) that I will thereafter be ready to do the Work. The Work is here, now. It’s in sleepless nights and caught cycles of trauma, in feeling exhaustion in every bone, in bottoming out and finding nowhere else to turn. The Work is here and the gods are here and I am here, and I’m glad.