Editor’s Note: We want to thank our writers for contributing unique, moving, and personal stories related to the new reality of a world besieged by the virulent coronavirus. We will be sharing those stories with you, along with our usual articles. We hope they bring you comfort, camaraderie, and company during difficult times.

By Susanna Starr

How quickly people adjust. Or am I just saying this from the relative safety of my home up in the mountains of northern Mexico? Here, distancing is easy because that's the way we live normally. From the comfort of my couch, I can see the entire lower Hondo valley, I can see the snow-capped mountains, and I can watch the magpies building their nests in the juniper trees as they've done for the forty-five years since I moved onto this property. The grass is growing green, the apricot trees are blooming just as they always do during this time of early spring.

Monday is my birthday but the prediction for that day is cool and cloudy. So, my kids came over today to sit in the sun six feet apart. It wasn't a party because that wasn't what it was about. It was the gift of seeing them and hanging out together for a little while. No food, no drink. It was the second time Mirabai and Ganga Das came for a visit since we returned from Mexico three-and-a-half weeks ago and the first time for Amy and Eric. Since Roy lives on this property in his own casita, I have the pleasure of seeing my son on a daily basis, although he doesn’t come inside. Nor does anyone else.

But, there's not a day that goes by that I don't express my gratitude for our way of life, chosen many decades ago, as an alternative to the world as we knew it then. And, there's not a day that goes by that I don't think of all the people living in small apartments with small children and no outdoor areas who are worrying not only about the pandemic that is sweeping across the world but the stark challenges of simple survival without jobs or money.

We don't watch television, don't have a dishwasher, and we trudge up the hill to use the small washer/dryer that's in Roy's casita. Actually, he does the laundry for us, although I still enjoy taking it down from the line myself. Most of our house is on solar but soon we'll be beefing up our system to include the rest of our house and Roy's casita, as well.  Our deepwater well is connected to solar and our plan is to have all appliances run on solar. We would like to continue to do our part in replacing the horrendous effects of all the pollution spewed into the air every moment in every country.

We left Laguna Bacalar on March 17 arriving home the same night, immediately going into self-isolation. The day after that we closed our commercial gallery. I'm grateful for social security because, for the first time in my adult life, I'm without income, now going on more than a month. I spent the first couple of weeks calling all the people to whom I have monthly payments, insurance, mortgage, utilities, rent, and the ubiquitous and insidious credit card companies. Then, I’d take a break and read, just to keep my head screwed on straight and not give in to the feeling of overwhelm.

Not watching television allows us many hours of space where we're not bombarded with news of the virus pandemic although, obviously, we receive it at our own chosen rate and source. Our hopes are for the blue skies appearing over Delhi to become a harbinger of things to come, for the world to wake up to what's been happening to this earth of ours. 

John, my partner (to differentiate him from the many other Johns), continues to deal with his still unidentified health condition which we accept simply as an auto-immune disease. He's lost more than 50 pounds and if we go back to how he was before this began two years ago, a good deal more. I hover at about 97 pounds, something I never would have considered but which is now my norm. Still, John's spirit is strong and my energy remains much the same though I do notice the difference that aging often brings, now being in our eighties from how we felt unchanged in our seventies.

I came home from Laguna Bacalar with a rash that I originally thought were mosquito bites and then some other kind of bites. However, they persisted and worsened and just yesterday I had my first day of feeling that not my every waking moment was concerned with the horrible itching over my entire back and, later, my front and later moving up across my shoulders. Today is the second day, and it's either time (a month) or the new medicated cream that has given me a new lease on life.

So, you might be wondering, with all the time that I have, not working and self-isolating, am I taking the opportunity to do some writing? I'm afraid the answer is that this is the most writing I've done. Maybe one of these days I'll sit down to the keyboard and see if anything worthwhile emerges. But now, at this moment, my eyes go across the valley to see that precious light illuminating the hills of the valley nestled here in the Sangre de Cristos. Now, it's gone. How quickly! It's a reminder to treasure every moment, because we're now, more than ever, aware of how quickly those normal but beautiful moments can vanish.

How many times and places have there been when the population feels these are the best of times and these are the worst of times? There is no doubt that these are some of the worst of times and, for once, they are not restricted to particular regions or countries. The virus knows no borders. Can some of the best of times grow from these times that the world turned and the one that we knew will remake itself because it means survival? 

Blessing to all, those we know and those we don't...

Susanna Starr, an entrepreneur, photographer, speaker, artist, and writer, holds a degree in philosophy and has over twenty years experience in the hospitality business as owner of Rancho Encantado, an eco-resort and spa in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. She lives in the mountains of northern New Mexico, and is the author of Fifty and Beyond: New Beginnings in Health and Well-Being and Our Interwoven Lives with the Zapotec Weavers: An Odyssey of the Heart, published by Paloma Blanca Press.