I have a collection of magazines, featuring articles and photographs of places where I’d like to rent a house, explore, and spend time writing.  This is one of the few opportunities in my life when I have the money and time and not able to travel.

The scared elephant-in-the-room is blocking the door from COVID-19. FEAR is a dangerous house-guest. My visitor has taken up residency and freely confronts my-optimistic-self.

There’s a fine line, I think, between solitude, loneliness, and isolation. In any respect, FEAR, if not driven out—seeps into the mind—trampling logic, life, and reality.

When FEAR is asleep—magazines, music playing, and phone calls to friends and family temporarily lock-out FEAR. But to be honest, I haven’t been able to retrieve the door key FEAR has stolen and hidden. My writing is ITS captive, as well. Creativity mixes a strong cocktail of the news, face masks, social-distancing, vacant grocery shelves, over-do stimulus/unemployment checks, bankrupt businesses, and unexpected deaths. The word: lock-down is my prison, and no longer a movie’s description showing jailed convicts. Some days, in all accounts FEAR is happy, almost exuberant, knowing its family is breeding and finding new homes.

If the only thing we have to fear is fear itself (Franklin D. Roosevelt)— then we are stronger, our communities are stronger, and the world is stronger. I don’t want to kill the elephant-in-the-room. I want to set it free, dissolve it, erase it, and vanquish it . . . at least for a while, because FEAR is needed. It’s a good cocktail when mixed with intuition:  IT protects, warns, enlightens, and pushes forward better judgment.

Nowadays, FEARS are uncertainties and multitude shades of grey watercolors. Vivid shades of rainbow oil colors have to paint the rooms where FEAR resides. It is these permanent inks that will make FEAR uncomfortable and leave.

A few days later…with a fresh paint brush….

Looking around my living room, I was overwhelmed by a feeling of peace and gratitude. I did not feel an impulse to improve something, to gripe about its imperfections, or to daydream about having something else, something better. I felt the undeniable and irresistible peace of knowing that I needed absolutely nothing else. And for the first time in weeks since I changed the colors of each room, I realized FEAR is something that will come and go, but WILL-POWER is the deepest part of me, and I HAVE the KEY.