Quarantine is like bone broth...

On the phone with a dear chef friend, she explained the process of making bone broth. Bone broth cooks for a good long time. Hours. Overnight. The slow process of waiting pulls everything valuable from the bones. You can't do anything. You just need to wait. You can't rush it. You can't make it happen. Time does. The bones sit and release all their goodness slowly. It made me think. We are the bones...in quarantine...sitting and simmering...quarantined in our own four walls. As an artist, I wonder what I should be doing with my time - should being the operative word. Thinking of the next project. Being creative. Producing. I keep wanting to speed the process up, wanting to make something happen.

Perhaps it's not about the doing, but the patience in simmering. Trusting that the process is happening. Perhaps great projects are brewing. Perhaps the time spent dealing with our minds in isolation will expand them. Perhaps the simple process of communal pain - connecting with each other - will change the world. Maybe we don't know what we will become - how long this will last - what shift will occur in the world or within ourselves. And maybe that not knowing, and simply allowing the quiet, the boredom, the nothingness to happen...that is the process. (On that note - here's a lovely article from the Guardian about just that.)

As a native NYer, it's not in my DNA to do nothing. I like forward movement. Never calm in the quiet, ready to go, do, produce, create, help, think. Staying still can be like death. Not knowing what next. Unable to plan for a future I can't imagine. When will we get our city back? Days, weeks, months? What will our world look like? What will work look like?

So somehow it helps me to sit here and contemplate bone broth. Doing nothing. Learning how to be still and trusting the process to work without grasping and trying to make it go faster. Just being the bone.