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I don’t remember when was the last time I posted something to this blog. I do know that it’s been a very long time, and that much has happened since then. At some point I thought I would just leave this blog there, untouched, with a series of mementos that were put into writing. But among the many things that have happened in the time since my last post, is the disruption of our lives to such an extent that I needed to write again.

It’s already been months since a novel coronavirus disrupted our lives. By now, I have been working from home for almost a month. My husband is also home for about the same length of time, due, first to a cough that kept him away from work and then because the restaurant where he works laid him off after having to close that location during the pandemic. Adjusting to this new reality has been rough, to say the least. It’s taken us some time to adjust and find our new routines.

One of the things I do now daily is take long walks around my neighborhood. Every day after I finish with work, I put on my jacket, hat, and walking shoes, place a little bottle of disinfectant on my pocket, grab the keys and head for a walk. It’s been really enjoyable to see things from a different perspective. I prefer to walk without any headphones. I want to enjoy the sounds around me. Cars passing by. Birds chirping as they welcome the first glimpses of Spring. People jogging or families walking together while chatting. The sound of a lawn mower in a sunny early evening. The orchestra of leafs and branches captivating my attention as I walk by. I see new things that I rarely if ever noticed when driving by the same places. Light. Colors. Forms. Beauty.

This afternoon during my walk I noticed sometime that made me stop on my walk. Although I rarely take pictures during my walks, I took the picture that accompany this writing today. These little flowers are some of my favorite. They are wild flowers that grow wherever they feel like growing. Wherever a bee or a butterfly or a beetle or the wind took their seeds, there they grow and blossom.

These past few months we have experienced how nature can drastically disrupt our lives. A tiny, microscopic living being — a virus — has come to disrupt our lives in such a way that nothing will feel or be the same again for us. Nature can disrupt our lives in this way; without notice. As a theologian — albeit, atheist by choice, but a theologian nonetheless — this feels like creation. The disruptive nature of a world that is always being created, never stopping, always changing… It is the disruption of what we thought natural, orderly, comforting. This creation that along with the hurricanes that devastated my Island, and the earthquakes that finished it up, shake us up to the core and leave us in pain, grieving, mourning, pleading achingly for a moment of rest in the midst of all the chaos.

And then, on my walk, I find another sign of the always happening creation: a tiny plant breaks through the earth, and the grass that surrounds it, and parts of the human-made pavement that tried with all its apparent might to drown it. Nature disrupts again. It disrupts to remind us that, little and as insignificant as we might think it to be, it can burst through it all and still blossom.

I stopped. I touched this marvelous tiny piece of creation. I smiled to and with it. I acknowledged that just like the virus that has disrupted our lives, this too is creation. Nature disrupts us in ways we cannot imagine. It has done with in painful ways. It also does it in beautiful, inspiring, uplifting, and hopeful ways. Let it be. Let nature disrupt us with its beauty and passion. Let nature disrupt us with the reminder that it can burst out of the most unimaginable places to remind us that there will always be beauty and strength.