I have not suffered like many during this last pandemic year. Even so, it’s been a challenge. I’ve been caring for two vulnerable parents (one of whom passed away) and worrying, as mothers do, about the mental health of my three kids navigating the increasingly uncertain and seemly toxic world, where the air we breathe can carry acute illness into our most protected places and separate us from those we love and trust. The lines at food shelves and the COVID-19 death toll both grow unimaginably and our united states seem bent on violent fracture.As COVID-spring turned to COVID-summer, the constant stress made me ill—I was tired, achy and often nauseous.Emily Dickinson’s metaphor became my strategy to regain my health and balance. I closed down one social media account entirely, cleansed my Instagram of politics and pundits, and replaced them with … birds. At first, it was the colorful and the exotic that dominated my Instagram feed: the beautiful paired macaws, the jeweled hummingbirds, roseate spoonbills with a soft pink to rival the sunrise. Shockingly beautiful birds visiting shockingly beautiful flowers distracted and redirected my attention from politicians to rainforests, from overwhelming despair to moss-covered tree limbs. That lovely distraction was like taking a deep breath. Hope.As time passed, my favorite Instagram sites shifted from those featuring the exotic, showy birds to those with birds more common to my experience in central Minnesota: awkward, gangly egrets triumphantly savoring fish; a branch full of blue birds enjoying the spring sunshine; a cedar waxwing on a snowy limb; a common chickadee surveying the world from the branch of a high bush cranberry, exactly like the one outside my window. Seeing my local birds featured so humbly yet beautifully helped evolve that first hope from a distant, feathery ideal to something more solid that could perch familiarly on a place much closer to my own soul.
I hope, like me, you have developed your own strategies for managing the challenges of our times. I hope that it feels to you, as it does for me, that as a country we are experiencing both a seasonal and metaphorical spring; that soon, things will start to grow again and to breathe more freely. If you are still looking for strategies, I encourage you to think of Ms. Dickinson’s words but also of her metaphor … that thing with feathers may be as close as your own window or just across town at a nearby park or trail just waiting for you. Go outside! Look up! Hope!
Kris Hansen is a Belwin Conservancy board member. She is a lab manager at 3M and also the cross-country ski coach at Stillwater High School (Olympic Gold Medalist Jessie Diggins went through her program). Kris and her family live in Afton.
