Pandemic Invitations For Therapeutic Edgelands

March 17th, 2020 in Michigan

Confirmed Cases: 65

Right now, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, it feels like reality is crumbling. The things I thought I could rely upon are now tenuous. Yet, every day, I sit down and make a small piece of art to share with my community because it feels necessary. I know it sounds hyperbolic, but it really does feel like a survival instinct.

On March 17, 2020, before Michigan enacted the “stay at home” order, I met up with my dear friend Emmy at a state park —we were practicing social distancing and therefore could not hug each other for fear of spreading the virus, so instead we hugged two nearby trees. This small act of connection with these beautiful trees and each other sparked a new creative practice. I began writing daily invitations designed to help us come back into our bodies through sensory engagement within nearby ecologies, playfully to reimagine our place within our environment, to envision possible futures, feel our emotions, and sometimes provide comedy and relief. I can’t quite explain it, but it feels like the world is offering these invitations to me, and for some reason I need to share them.

As I look at everyone’s amazing mutual aid efforts and feel that sense of connection and “heldness,” I see that we are beginning to practice ways of being that will bring us into a new reality. My invitations are intended to make space to practice for new worlds we might live into, even, and perhaps especially, in the context of this urgency and loss. I Invite you (https://www.instagram.com/awe.society/ ) to play with me in the borderlands between the old world and the new—in that permeable space between us.

Yours truly,

Bridget Quinn

March 20, 2020 in Michigan
Confirmed Cases: 549
Deaths: 4

March 26, 2020 in Michigan
Confirmed Cases: 2,856
Deaths: 60

More from Bridget Quinn: www.bridgetfrancesquinn.com