Lock down, quarantine, shelter in place orders: as the world approaches a full year in a state altered by pandemic conditions, these restrictions on movement fray my nerves still.

My read of the week unwinds the tension in my mind and gives me new perspective on the long path to healing for the world and for each of us.

“Healing is in the moment,” Brenna Fitzgerald writes in this essay for Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. “The moment is in the body—each breath, each heartbeat a reminder of how vulnerable it is to live in time and space.”

Brenna would know. She fractured her foot two weeks into lockdown last March, in a moment of extreme stress. The healing process inspired her collage, “I Am Moments,” also appearing in Intima.

A spiral shell superimposed on a drawing of a human heart, the image unsettles me. But it also calms me, the expanding repetition of the shell indicating the endurance of my heart moment by moment.

There’s a small room in my house where I do most of my writing and where I go to retreat when I can. It’s got plants in it and books and when the sun is up, light. Brenna’s unfolding collage reminds me of this room where I go to feel the green, even now in the dead of winter.