My blog post is late.

I have been writing versions of this post since last Thursday evening, planning to be entirely ready for my Sunday deadline, but somehow it is Thursday night again and I am still rewriting my thoughts here. Ironic, since my outline focused on how last week’s Mass readings were telling me to wake up and be ready.

This was what I planned for my opening paragraph, in case you were curious:

I have always been a morning person. Ever since the 5:30 am swim practices of my high school years, I have considered it almost a point of pride that I could waltz out of bed and into a freezing pool with only a little complaining. I love the way the air smells in the early morning, just after the sun has come up, the way the dew glistens and a lingering fog might cling to the ground. It is a time of vulnerability, of almost-reality, when coffee tastes better and everything is fresh.

…and then I just didn’t finish the thought.

While it may just be the result of my natural inclination towards procrastination in the extreme, the fact remains that this week has been a momentous and rather tumultuous one for the Wexford household. Last Friday, Joseph completed his two week quarantine and moved into our Cluain Dara house. Tuesday and Thursday of last week saw Emma and Anibee receive their visa preclearance approvals at last, and after a rush to their respective airports and many delayed and cancelled flights, they are safely settled in quarantine in Kilmore here in Wexford. After Anibee arrived Tuesday and Emma was safely settled Wednesday, I felt as though I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d been holding. This year has been so uncertain, and I am so beyond grateful that our whole community is finally in the same time zone.

I’ve not lived on my own for very long before; I am grateful to have grown up with a large family, and to have had lovely roommates in college, all sharing a residence hall with around 270 women in my dorm community. I enjoy being surrounded by people and constant activity. These past two months have probably been the longest I’ve gone without a community to come home to, and it has reminded me once again just how precious it is to share time and space with one another.

Of course, my two months of solitude in the Teach Bhríde house were definitely not wasted – I learned to make Irish soda bread; enjoyed spending time with Fr. Denis and Fr. Barry over lunches and in Mass, especially after a long summer of separation and uncertainty; established some healthy rituals for myself, including reading in preparation for grad school (whenever that is to happen) and for pleasure, channeling my election anxiety into volunteering with phone banks for a congressional campaign I’m passionate about, listening to podcasts that motivate and interest me.

In all of this activity though, I found myself avoiding spending much time in silent contemplation. My initial desire to write about “waking up” stems from this, I believe – in a moment of so much instability, it can be easy to blur everything out and float from one task to the next. In my life, it has always been people who break that cycle, who mark the time and rhythm of my days and who encourage me to do that “waking up” to the needs of the world around me. And in a moment when many of us are isolated from the people who guide and love us,  it takes an abundance of energy to find ways to integrate them into our lives while keeping them safe. All this is to say – let your blog posts be late if they must be, and wake up to the world when you are ready. And let’s remember that we are united in this moment of strife, despite time zones and lockdowns, and that God is in both the solitude and in community, both in silence and in the bustle of a full household.