Corona Care Package

As I struggle with where to direct my energy and altruism during this tsunami wave of tragedy, I discovered the helpful resources below. They have been a salve to my soul, so I thought I would share them to help provide care and comfort to others. With Love & Faith, Danielle

Art: Learn about Frida Kahlo’s life, which I find fitting given she discovered her greatest gifts during her darkest hours.

Invitation: One of my favorite humans, Tiffany Shlain, wants you to co-create a cloud film about what’s happening.

Tunes: This new Spotify mix is not a pick-me, but rather a smattering of haunting, cinematic, orchestral scores that measure the somber and textured nature of the crisis. We have to feel all the feels, so this is a place for sadness, grief and fear can dance.

Kindness: I am touched by the loving ways this family welcomes home their mom, a UK nurse. Every healthcare worker deserves this. And if you haven’t seen Some Good News, go grab a tissue and watch humankind at our best.

Creative Ways to Help:

• Everyman Espresso lets you buy coffee for frontline workers.
• Frontline Foods is where you can support healthcare workers with healthy meals.
• Invisible Hands is a place to help the most at-risk community members facing Covid-19 by making food deliveries.
• Giving Dignity for Loved Ones is a Go Fund Me campaign to purchase tablets and devices so surviving family members can provide emotional support or say goodbye with dignity.
• Help Main Street is where you can buy gift cards to provide critical cash to support closed businesses during the shut-down.

Literature: I’ve turned to the Four Minute Essays by Dr. Frank Crane for guidance. This collection of books was published in 1918, so I presume these were written during the Spanish Flu. Many passages are relevant to our resilience today. Here is one called:

The Ultimate Resource

You must have something in your life that does not depend upon anybody else.

If you would have your happiness secure, the root of it must be within yourself.

This is not a doctrine of selfishness, but of self defense.

Much of our happiness is necessarily bound up with other people; it is the result of our human relationships. Companionship is that which tempers laughter, play, and work, and is the essence itself of love.

Very many of us never get beyond this range of joy. We are incapable of any pleasure that is not communal. We shudder at solitude. We flee ourself as the prince of boredom.

But those who would be secure against the shocks of existence, who would feel that they are rooted deep enough to withstand the blasts of time and circumstance, must discover themselves.

They must have some ultimate resource that the world cannot touch.

Some people find this in their vocation. Some in their avocation. Some discover it in the fruits of their imagination. Some find it in religion.

One this sure. The strong soul, the hero for whom nothing is tragic, the well-poised life which no untoward event can thrust into panic, is the one who has learned that the deepest supplies upon which the soul feeds, the most inexhaustible and wholesome supplies, are those that lie within himself.

In the score of the world, in isolation, contempt, and hunger, he can turn to fate with a smile and say, “I have meat to eat that ye know not of.”