Joy, Anyway

Today I experienced a small, extraordinary thing.

After an inspiring writers’ workshop, my head filled with swirling images from the stories I had just listened to... stories of color and light, of flying dragons and soaring yellow birds (and after spending ten to twelve hours a day these days in front of a computer between online workshops and acting students) I needed to move my body; to run out Into it. So, I did.

(I took my face mask with me.)

When I walk or run in my Hawai'i neighborhood and I pass someone on the street, there's usually a nod or an obligatory wave. Everyone's paying attention to their own breath, their own run, as they should be.

Today, in the late afternoon, on an empty street on the Big Island of Hawai'i, someone in the one of the houses was playing loud music. Decent loud music.
 
And there was a rainbow ring around the sun as three of us - each of us walking or running from different directions - converged on the street to look up.

It's a wide street and we were more than six feet apart, but we naturally pulled even further apart (yes, even outside). It was me, a young guy, and an older woman. I recognized both of them from the neighborhood although I had never spoken to either one of them and they didn't seem know each other.

Maybe we initially stopped because of the music or because there's so little human contact and the business-as-usual wave didn't seem like enough today. Maybe it really was the rainbow ring around the sun.
 
Or maybe it felt like something needed to be said about all this. About the world now.

But there were no words. What is there to say?

And for me, nothing said from ten feet apart on a street would have come close to the significance of the words that had been written and read and spoken back in the workshop I had just finished.

And here's the small pandemic miracle. 

With no words and all that distance, we started dancing in the street to that music. Really dancing. A teenage girl who must have seen us from her window came running out and then there were four of us, ten or more feet apart, on a street in Hawai'i, dancing.

The last time I had a meaningful experience with strangers it was two years ago in an airport and we didn't introduce ourselves. Today we told each other our names after the music stopped and the dance was over.

We didn't say, "see you later" or "let's do it again" because no one knows what later means now and even though we all live in this neighborhood, we don't know each other.

But in the middle of COVID 19, there was a moment of joy with people I'd never officially met but will certainly remember.

A small, extraordinary thing in the middle of a pandemic.
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Here's to joy, anyway. During all this. 💕