This picture kind of sums it all up for me at the moment...

Just as was the case at the end of January, and at the end of February, we are still immobilized by the CMCO, and our very modest day-to-day activities are represented pretty accurately in the month's 1SE compilation.

I really have to wonder about the frequent extension of the CMCO in its current form, when its provisions are clearly not bringing Sarawak's covid numbers down... We've gone from poster-child to basket-case in the Malaysian context, and I really feel a new approach is needed. Of course, I wouldn't be ecstatic about even tighter restrictions. No-one would. But if that's what's needed to actually get us out of this mess...

This was the month when we not only celebrated my birthday, but also recalled that we've been under mobility restrictions of one sort or another for a whole year now...

If I reread my review of March last year, it seems glaringly apparent that there's so much that's still exactly the same, an entire year later...

A radius that's shrunk right in (more than ever really, for us); the worry that life is ticking by as we're stuck in this ghastly limbo (again more than ever, as bodies definitely deteriorate in these less than optimal physical and mental conditions); and the need to breathe and hold on -- and hope if you possibly can, though there may be days when you can't hope, and you just have to bury yourself in something that stops you thinking.


My solutions at the end of March last year are still pretty much my solutions now:

-- Do what travel you can (for us that's really lamentably little at the moment, so that even a walk to a different temple and some cute cat bushes makes the news);
-- Engage in as wide a variety of language activities as is feasible (still a really important pursuit for me); and
-- Escape into novels (and movies, TV series, and songs)


I guess I would now specifically add:

-- Write about everything (because I do -- almost obsessively -- write about everything).

Thus, it's been a record month for The Velvet Cushion, with three posts on movies and TV viewing, and four posts on books: The Eighth Life, The Book of Delights, The Things They Carried, and The Sympathizer.

Frankly, The Velvet Cushion is by far the most interesting of the three blogs at the moment...

But there's also been a new arrival on Vintage Travel, with a post about our first trip to Viet Nam. I enjoy doing these, because I enjoy being prodded to remember, and to analyse the experience I'm remembering from the perspective of however many years later. But I'm still not sure I get the tone right. I seem to lurch between not enough detail and too much.

Anyway, there is little more to say about this month.

So I'll leave you with this beautiful poem by Wendell Berry, brought to my attention, as so often, by Maria Popova.

I don't think things need to be that wild to "work", actually... The closest I come to this peace is on the balcony in the mornings, when it's still dark, and maybe there's a big moon gazing down, or I can see pricks of lightning against the black, or as dawn comes, big, rosy clouds piled on the horizon, and maybe there's the sound of frogs or crickets or soft rain or really early birds...

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.