Happy Spring

It has been a year since life changed dramatically in the US because of COVID-19. In the early days, as lockdowns began, retired teacher Kitty O’Meara wrote and shared a poem that many of us encountered last spring. She wrote it to sustain her own spirits, but her words sustained many others, too. Now, with an entire pandemic year behind us (though not the pandemic itself), we revisit her prose poem.

As we watch nature wake from winter, we see the hope that vaccines offer, breaking through our COVID winter like a first glimpse of spring sun, promising opportunities we have long missed. But O’Meara’s vision transcends a return to the same old normal. She conjures, even as lockdowns began, what our post-COVID lives, after a time of pause from the lives we had before, might become. At the very least, after COVID, there is much that we will no longer take for granted.

Here is Kitty O’Meara’s prose poem:
 

And the People Stayed Home

And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.

And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.
 

For more about Kitty O’Meara and her poem, which has now been illustrated and published as a children’s picture book, see “The story behind ‘And the People Stayed Home,’ the little poem that became so much more” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/and-the-people-stayed-home-poem/2020/12/09/3f2411fe-3961-11eb-bc68-96af0daae728_story.html).

Our second Sunday offering for this first day of spring comes from composer Michael Whalen. Michael is a welcome fishing friend at Leen’s Lodge, where his creativity is favorably applauded. He posted his lovely, reflective improvisation “Waiting for Spring” a little more than a month ago.

VIDEO LINK: https://youtu.be/4mLC6nQ81mk

Note Michael’s T-shirt featuring NYC landmark Russ and Daughters Café. I can remember waiting in line at Russ and Daughters while a customer was shopping for an order that would be dry ice packed. She was flying NY to Hong Kong with the package and planned to serve the wonderful array of smoked fish at a brunch she was hosting the day after her arrival (https://www.russanddaughterscafe.com).

We are thinking of smoked fish and of seeing people and places in person again when COVID spring blooms for sure. Happy Sunday. Happy Spring.

David R. Kotok
Chairman of the Board & Chief Investment Officer
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