Parting our Covid Cloud

 

Written November 18, 2020

Our human need is relationship. All of us agree on this

 

But do we agree it's key to our covid cloud needing parting?  Covid clouds our capacity to know and respond successfully to each other. It’s a job to build the courage to care and respond around the constrictions, mandates, and yes, legitimate fears.

 

What can we do when we must have a mask? We still have our eyes. They talk too. And we still have our voice. Many young children not easily heard need help realizing they can actually be heard through a mask. Our eyes, our hands and our voice can reach past a mask. Physical distancing makes it harder to hear and touch, but when the attempt is seen it counts too.  Most of us don’t like stopping our voices in fear our larynx might slew out a virus cloud against a loved one.  Most of us can be asymptomatic super-spreaders like this. It all assumes physical presence.

 

Enter the digital age. Can this be a gift to part our covid cloud? We need to thank our caregivers who often focus on our shared technology to connect with loved ones in case of exposure or a positive test. It is not a diversion from health care. It’s at the heart of our loved ones’ capacity to survive an infection.

 

All of us can prepare for the possibility of isolation. We can be sure phone numbers are updated and working. We can practice active face video so we know how to see and respond with faces unmasked.  We can ask hospital caregivers to help our family elders make our digital connections work–and thank God we have this option.  

 

What’s not widely known is that loss of human responsive relationships almost certainly will damage human health, mentally and physically, and interfere with recovery. Medical schools now train integrating physical medicine with the spiritual and relational, a practice deeply centered in the heritages of indigenous people here in Montana. All of us have a generations-old heritage of valuing mutually responsive relationship with children. We now have an urgent need to understand how.

 

The Adverse Childhood Experiences study helps.  In 2014, retired, I responded to an ad to attend a conference in Billings with Center for Disease Control epidemiologist Dr. Rob Anda. I signed up and took two additional training sessions with his training group in Montana the next two years, and was certified a master trainer. This is where I learned the often ignored importance of responsive relationship in children’s development.  I thought it was enought to get children's responses to me. I had no idea this needs balance with response to them. Now I know this extends to elders as well, and to all family members. And after this past week of funerals, visits, and phone calls with best friends and family members ill with covid, I thought of this training. It changed my mind, and charts a way forward with covid.

 

I always knew the fun of mutually responsive interaction.  I enjoyed my kids; building and crashing block towers, peekaboo, playing catch, learning to dance or drum with our adopted family–when I had time. Now I know that learning and doing things back an forth, exchanging giving and recieving responses, is really fun work. In younger children it is essential to develop the executive function of the human mind.  Skills needed to do things, skills being with family to cooperate, care and share, all help children grow strong, and builds capacity their capacity to heal and grow through life.

 

But most important is the science-based fact that we need mutually responsive physical interaction through life. We all were born in an experience of trauma. We reached for and found human response beginning with our mother. Now when older, more vulnerable to covid, when connections like these are clouded, we need the same deliverance we found at our birth. Again we all need games, even the World Series, and being face-to-face in real time even if it must be digital screens.  It’s not “just for fun.” It’s where the Divine is present in the human realm. It’s why our religious practices are so important. We know God responds to us, and we know it best when humans do too.  In joining in religious practices together, even online, we are parting the confusion of the covid cloud.  God gifts us to see and cherish our human relationships as He did in the story of Jesus. Let’s join more in parting the covid cloud here.