pandemic Archives - Ingrid Murray

Things of Note, 2021

Wonderful friends who show up consistently and with so much love. Walks with Micaela, a surprise birthday picnic, “to make you laugh is a gift,” time with Liz and Madeline and the Mitchells, dinner and breweries with (and cookies for) Joanna, celebrating 25 years of friendship with Ani, continued weekly craft nights with Viv. Reminders that I matter and I am loved and I can lean in and ask for help. Among Us. Brigit’s bachelorette and wedding.
Traveling: Mexico and Tunisia. Dinner in a cave. Sweltering heat. Beach days and freckles. Kelibia. Native animals: wild cats and dogs and coatimundi and iguanas, and a tiny kitten. Winning over the family dog. Experiencing different ways of living. Rediscovering how much I love traveling. Learning that I love honoring my self.
Deepening a relationship with family. German and Arabic; making connections despite a language barrier. Family reunion and a copperhead snake and Christmas and trips to Harrisburg. Realizing how important in-person connection is to my mental health.
Deeping my relationship with myself. A wonderful therapist, and steady growth. High points and many, many low points. Unpacking trauma in the midst of a pandemic. Choosing to keep going every single day.
Moments of uncontrollable laughter. Family game days and Tik Tok and a lost phone and Anomia. “Pull! Pull!!” “Your mom’s a lamp.” Finding joy where I can. Laughing right into the new year. Dogs running to greet me when I pass the dog park.
Getting a vaccine, and a booster. Celebrating the continued health of those I love.
The joy and overwhelm and awe of the cicadas. The noise. The brevity of their emergence. The magic of watching the vulnerability and transformation of a final moult.
Making big decisions. A new job. An important trip planned for the new year. Building skills and planning the future.
Making lots of art. Participating in Elsie Magazine’s collage challenge, iHanna’s Postcard Swap (my contributions), Daisy Yellow’s ICAD project, and the new Fill a Tiny Journal project. Playing with acrylic inks. Painting over old wood panel pieces and starting again. Learning new things I love. Returning to bookbinding and working in a new, handmade art journal. Remembering how far I’ve come.
Witnessing the passage of time and the seasons. Starting to use the 1SE app again to capture daily life. Snow, thunderstorms, warm weather, chimney swifts. Autumn leaves. The first frost. “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives” (Mary Oliver).
Spending the final days of December reflecting. Being able to look back on an entire year of daily notes in my logbook, and realizing how many good moments I would have otherwise forgotten.

Mundane Notes from a Pandemic

Yesterday, I saw that the New York Times had done a project highlighting logbook entries made during the pandemic. Here are two of my favorites:

Lynne hosted mah jongg. Picked up new glasses. Spaghetti carbonara for dinner.”
“We’re at the hospital to train staff on Covid-19 infection, prevention and control. Staff are slowly, slowly arriving to the training site. Thousands of dragonflies are flitting about the courtyard.”

Turns out, the NYT project was inspired by Austin Kleon, who keeps his own logbook to help capture the everyday highs and lows of his life (see more here). I actually started my own logbook back in April. While I want to be a person who keeps a daily journal, I just don’t have the discipline or the attention span, and a logbook is a good way to capture the bullet points of a day without spending much time on it.

I didn’t plan it out too well when I started, and am currently in my third pocket Moleskine for this year. I did buy the full-year diary that Austin uses, so my 2021 notes will be a little more organized.

Here are a couple pages from my own notes:

COVID & HOBBES: Week 15

Somewhere between weeks 12 and 14, I decided that I would wrap up the COVID & HOBBES project when I had completed 100 days’ worth of collages. When I began — on March 16, three days after the coronavirus was named a pandemic and the first day of many, many days of working from home — I anticipated doing two week’s worth of Calvin and Hobbes remixes. (Ha!)

Looking back, these little daily snapshots really do capture what it has been like to process something so big and overwhelming and scary and uncertain.

I think these final two collages sum 2020 up entirely: it’s a year that is both worth writing off forever and a year that has the potential to generate meaningful and lasting systemic change for marginalized communities, if we get to work.

See the rest of the series (and please, keep wearing a mask):