Lockdown is a strange bedfellow and companion. Unseen but the effects are felt throughout each day and night. To me it’s very like the J Ruth Gendler book of Qualities . Each emotion is described so thoroughly and they sometimes meet or bump into each other. Despair, loss, fear, but then hope. Hope when things are relaxed a little but fear as we realise it’s all too soon and await the next spike in this dreadful virus.
So lockdown. We don’t see the thing but it’s all around us . We woke up in a strange new world that isn’t going back to how it was. It’s like the fairy tale RIP Van  Winkle, he slept for what he thought was one night and woke up 20 years later in a strange time. That’s what has happened to us, although we saw signs of it coming when the virus first started. None of us could forecast how it would become.
We have had to learn to live so very differently. Touch is not allowed, 2 metres does not allow it. It’s hard if you are a small child at school perhaps needing comforting should you fall. They even have to supposedly put their own plasters on?
It’s bad if you have your first grandchild due and you can’t be there for the birth, or visit and hold the baby for the first time. What’s app and face time, zoom etc can’t replicate the emotion you feel when first looking at the small being who has just entered this world.
It’s awful for those dying alone in a hospital bed with no familiar faces around or loved ones holding your hand as you take the next step on your journey.
Or a funeral with limited mourners, how can you say goodbye or celebrate a life cut short by this?
How do we make a new life but a positive one for ourselves out of it all?
What seeds are planted for hope and joy? There has to be some good from it all.
More kindness? More care for our fellow man and woman. But at the moment the world is in chaos and still reeling.
Planting seeds for us all.