Staying Power: Writings from a Pandemic Year

By Phyllis Cole-Dai

Rebuild Your Resilience After the Pandemic and Prepare for a New Normal!

 

Life can be tough, [even in the best of times. But life in a pandemic requires a special sort of staying power. Imagine yourself doing what must be done without giving up, despite how difficult your circumstances or how tired you get. Imagine yourself holding fast to your center.

 

More than mere stamina, staying power involves exceptional commitment and trust, even a kind of faith. It's as much about the spirit as the body. We build it by …

• nurturing gratitude
• increasing resilience.
• practicing patience
• developing empathy and compassion
• appreciating the beauty of what's true
• keeping faith with ourselves and others

Multi-genre author Phyllis Cole-Dai draws on the power of wit, insight, storytelling, and emotional intelligence to help you build your resilience. Her weekly Staying Power newsletter has supported a throng of readers throughout the COVID-19 outbreak. Now she offers this inspiring collection of soulful musings and poetry to companion you through the remaining pandemic and into the uncharted territory of the "new normal."

 

Read to remind yourself how resilient you are.
Read to remember that your spirit is bigger than your anxieties and worries, your wounds and losses.
Read to remember you're not alone.

 

Get your copy today and boost your staying power!

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bell Sound Books
• Release date: Apr 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737105596

Phyllis Cole-Dai

Phyllis Cole-Dai began writing on an old manual typewriter in childhood and never stopped. Her work explores things that tend to divide us, such as class, ethnicity, religion and gender, so that we might wrestle our way into deeper understandings of one another.  Phyllis has authored or edited nine books in multiple genres, including historical fiction, memoir, and poetry. Her latest book is Beneath the Same Stars, a novel of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 (One Sky Press, 2018). With Ruby R. Wilson she co-edited the award-winning Poetry of Presence: An Anthology of Mindfulness Poetry (Grayson Books, 2017). Her memoir The Emptiness of Our Hands, co-authored with James Murray, chronicles 47 days that the two of them practiced “being present” while living by choice on the streets of Columbus, Ohio (3rd ed., Bell Sound Books, 2018). Phyllis now lives with her scientist-husband, teenage son, and two cats in a cozy 130-year-old house in Brookings, South Dakota. 

Book preview

Retreat I: Visitation

In February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic began to sweep the United States, I left my South Dakota home for a ten-day personal writing retreat in San Diego. I take such a solitary retreat every winter, heading somewhere warmer and greener than where I live. You might call it a booster shot of milder weather and brighter sunshine to tide me over until spring. This time around, I planned to work on a novel-in-progress.

Through Airbnb, I’d rented a tiny pool house, no bigger than four hundred square feet. Painted bright yellow, trimmed in white, and full of windows and light, it was a welcoming sight. On the garden fence just outside hung a ceramic art piece of a naked woman reading. An auspicious sign, don’t you think? A woman who has stripped herself down to her most vulnerable for the sake of a book?

One night, about halfway through my retreat, I dreamed that one of my aunts had invited multitudes of family members and friends to a reunion at her house. Once gathered, we realized she was dying. She’d summoned us to say goodbye.

She asked us all to gather around her bed. (In dreams, multitudes can easily do that.) Then she handed us a remarkable book, brittle with age. It was obviously handmade, one of a kind. I can still see its rich turquoise cover. I can still feel its delicate parchment pages. Its text, inscribed in an earthy brown ink, was embellished with ornate gold designs that caught and reflected the light.

The book was entitled For the Sake of One We Love and Are Losing. It was a long, contemplative poem, we discovered as we read it aloud in chorus. (Multitudes can easily do that, too, in dreams.)

We didn’t have many poetry enthusiasts among us, but that didn’t matter. As we gave voice to the words, a powerful wave of love and consolation swept through us. The intensity of that shared feeling woke me up.

Write down the words, I heard a voice say, though not in a voice you could hear.

It’s too cold to get out of bed, I said, snug beneath my blankets in the chilly room.

Write them down.

I need to go back to sleep.

Write them down.

In the morning, I said.

You’ll never remember them. Write them down. Now.

I gave up arguing. I reached for a journal and a pen.

I wrote in darkness, there in my bed beneath the skylight, fearing that turning on a light would wipe away the web of words so fragile in my recollection. My cold pen scratched the paper until ink began to flow. As my eyes adjusted, I began to see the page, just enough to scribble by.

Suddenly I was frantic to get the poem’s lines onto paper. I jotted down as many as I could remember, in whatever order they came. When I couldn’t retrieve any more from the black hole of memory, I dropped back to sleep, as if somebody had pulled my plug.

Preoccupied as I was with my novel-in-progress, I didn’t look seriously at my nocturnal scribblings until I was back in South Dakota. Then they surprised me. Together, they were like a rock found in a field, begging to be polished. I tumbled them for an hour or so, rearranging the lines, adding words and phrases to fill gaps in the flow, and deleting what made no sense.

What I was able to reconstruct of the dream-poem is but a shadow of the original. Yet its light pervades, like sunshine blazing down through the steel-gray clouds of a storm.

Why did the Muse bring this poem to me, of all people? Why did I dream it only a few days after Pat Dowd had died in obscurity, straight north of me, in San Jose? She was the first American now known to have died of the coronavirus. Only a month later, COVID-19 would hit the United States hard.

I can’t explain any of it, but the timing seems more than coincidence. Especially now, when we know how severely the pandemic has disrupted our customs of caregiving, leave-taking, and grief. Too many loved ones have suffered and died without us. We haven’t been able to comfort them in their passage from this life. We haven’t been able to make our goodbyes. We haven’t been able to gather in community to mourn their loss.

Perhaps this poem can help us say what we need to say. It can help us grieve as we need to grieve.

The dream on my retreat had the power of a visitation. It broke through as if from beyond. I feel a deep responsibility to honor the dream and the poem it brought. Encouraged and assisted by several poet friends, I’ve published it in several ways, including as a special edition book.

I present the poem in the pages that follow, offering it to you and all who grieve. No one is untouched by the anguish that attends suffering and loss. It’s an inescapable part of being human.

And because grief is universal, it can serve to bridge our differences. When we acknowledge and understand one another’s heartbreak, when we support one another through despair and sorrow, we build greater empathy and stronger community in our corner of a hurting world.

Read this poem for solace. Contemplate its lines. Share it during gatherings of farewell and remembrance. Offer it as a gift of compassion. However you use it, may it bring consolation.

For the Sake of One We Love and Are Losing

For the sake of one we love

and are losing,

we will not be afraid.

But when we are afraid

we will embrace what we fear

as if it were a lost child

crying in our arms.

We will not walk away

from what needs to be seen

and cared for.

We will not walk away.

---

For the sake of one we love

and are losing,

we will praise.

We will speak words of light.

We will let our thoughts rise

like a ring of smoke

widening into blue sky.

---

For the sake of one we love

and are losing,

we will let go the things

we do not understand.

We will set regrets like candles

upon the still waters

to float away

on their own time.

We will hang old wounds upon distant stars

whose light can absorb their weight.

All these will pass

beyond our need to see.

---

For the sake of one we love

and are losing,

we will not cling.

We will hold the hand gently.

We will wrap the body with fresh linens.

We will lay our head upon the shoulder.

We will bless the forehead

with tears and kisses.

All that has gone unspoken

because it could not be said before

will be said by this.

---

For the sake of one we love

and are losing,

we will suffer the final limits

of our devotion.

Death we cannot control.

Death we cannot fix.

This is the rock upon which we are split.

We cannot rise

yet still we will rise

to do the one more impossible thing.

---

For the sake of one we love

and are losing,

we will ready ourselves

to be more alone.

This is not a betrayal of the beloved.

It is acceptance of the branching paths

on the journey shared.

Before the great farewell,

we will break bread together.

We will draw water from the well

and lift it to one another’s lips.

What we need is here.

---

Each day that we have

danced and endured,

every certain step

and stumble

has prepared us

for just this.

We will be present

within the goodbye

so long as it lasts.

We do not know how

perfectly we can love

through our imperfections.

We cannot know what

we are made of

until they who have helped make us

leave us.

---

For the sake of one we love

and are losing,

we will go.

We will make our parting

not knowing how.

The road ends just ahead

but the land goes on.

The land goes on like mercy,

out and around forever.

Loose Pieces of Tumbling Glass

The day begins like any other day during this pandemic. I crawl out of bed into brief meditation. Then, in the bathroom, I top off the soap dispenser, replace yesterday’s hand towel with a fresh one, and thoroughly wash my hands. After taking my morning medicine, I go downstairs, where I greet Jihong. I’m not yet used to him being home when I start my morning. In normal times, he’d already be at the university, having wakened me with a kiss before he left.

In the kitchen, I put on a pot of coffee while Nathan and I swap tellings of the dreams we’d had in the night. I’m not yet used to him being at home either. He should be in school.

I smile at our two cats, playing lazily in patches of sunshine on the floor. Then I slip into the deep water of the latest bad news in the feed on my phone.

Just an ordinary pandemic day.

A short hour later, I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen, yelling in righteous rage at Jihong through streaming tears as Nathan looks on. What triggered me doesn’t matter. This morning, the tiniest prick in my skin would probably have provoked me. The emotions that have been swirling inside me during the pandemic are suddenly too much.

I’m angry that we didn’t do a better job as a country—as a world—preparing for it. After all, experts had long warned such a disaster was coming. I’m exasperated that we’re not responding more effectively and decisively now that it’s here.

I’m confused by all the ambiguous or contradictory information and guidance issued by the authorities.

I’m sad about all the concerts, graduations, weddings, funerals, and other significant life events that may never happen now, at least not in the traditional