Milena Nguyen Finding Peace and Strength in Lockdown

It’s Tuesday morning around 9 am. I’m sitting on my yoga mat, resting my back against the window in my bedroom. I just practiced yoga and meditated for a bit.

When I closed my eyes to meditate just now, I kept having images of nature: grass, trees, ocean.

I saw myself embracing and being embraced by the great big green, frolicking on the grass, standing knee-deep in the water.

I saw myself dancing with the waves, moving my body to the rhythms of nature.

I know why I saw those images: I miss nature.

Like many others, and perhaps like you too, I’ve been in lockdown for more than a month now. It’s difficult to feel nourished by nature in the middle of concrete blocks and steel bars.

I’ve tried complaining and discovered that it didn’t do me good.

So I don’t want to complain anymore.

I am a tree, my roots go deep, and my branches, they will stand tall

I can meet nature when I close my eyes.

I can still breathe the air, and remember that this very in-breath I take is part of a rainbow eucalyptus tree’s out-breath somewhere far away.

I can still look at the little plant in my apartment, whose name I don’t know and whose roots I just repotted in new soil, as she stands with her tiny leaves so vulnerably in the light coming through my window. And remember that mother Earth is breathing through her.

Perhaps I can feel the water in my body and remember that the ocean is within me all along.

The day before yesterday, I watched a Japanese cartoon called The Tale of The Princess Kaguya. In the movie, there is a scene when Princess Kaguya meets with a charcoal-maker in the middle of a dead forest. She fears that the forest will never return.

“What if the mountain is really dead?”

“It’s not. Everything comes back eventually. See for yourself. The tree is getting ready for spring,” the charcoal maker says, handing her a tiny twig.

“They are? So spring will come back again?”

“Sure it will. It’s like a circle. Just when you think one ends, another begins again. You can always count on it.”

You can always count on it. Nature heals. And because we’re part of nature, we will all heal. All of us. The earth will heal no matter the plague.

Maybe I’m too optimistic. But that’s how I choose to be.

Nature heals, and because we’re part of nature, we will heal.

Later today I will have work and meetings to attend to. I want to show up for my work the way nature does. Big and flowing and all-embracing. And joy, just look at the otters and the chipmunks and the birds and see how much joy they have.

I’m ending this journal entry by writing down an affirming poem for today.

I am at home in my body.
I am water, still and flowing.
I am a tree, my roots go deep,
and my branches, they will stand tall.

This poem is also my gift to you. May you have it in your heart. May you stand tall.