SELF-ISOLATION, DAY 6

I am starting this the night before again. When I work my schedule is messed up.

Today was so different. The store was mildly busy until about 4 or 5pm, then it grew quieter and by about 6pm was nearly dead. The store management was there and gave us all sealed, hot meals. We will all receive a bonus. I began to feel more kindly to the store management and the administration of the grocery store chain in general. The managers are all there, working along side of us and exposed as much to the risk as any of us. We are not soldiers but the population depends on food stores, gas stations, pharmacies and medical personnel; transportation, police and fire department; there are so many people who make up the network of caring for this society. What if none of them came to work? What would we do?

Today I felt more mellow, perhaps because the work was not so intense and we were gradually trying to restock the shelves and make the store appear a bit more like normal. It is getting there, but in any case it is not a situation where people are starving because we are unable to keep up. There are certainly people who are in danger. Those who are already poor and now unemployed from a meager job and wondering where any money will come from. We really have to care about the rest of our society. If not, I believe we will truly fall apart as a society. I mean, really.

OK, beginning again/starting on Day 6, which I started last night. I am getting confused. I’m tired. Not sick, just tired.

So, this is Sunday, I went to work again and by the 3^rd day of weekend work I am pretty tired. The store was very quiet all day and by 6pm, an hour early, I was just looking for things to do to act busy, but tired and bored. So I asked for and received permission to leave an hour early. I don’t care about the lost 1 hour pay. In the morning we had quite a bit of various groceries to put on the shelves, still from the shipments the night before. Everyone not involved doing something else, like cashiers and baggers, and including all of management, and myself, were busy stocking the shelves, with customers threading their way between workers. Still though, most everyone in a good mood and polite with each other.

People are coping, adjusting. The church I occasionally attend is using live-streaming, and I met a female pastor of a nearby church, in the grocery line, who told me they are live-streaming services, and the Theosophical Society I mentioned, will start using ZOOM for our Wednesday evening discussion and meditation groups. So, these are some very positive aspects. The streets were quieter, regarding vehicular traffic, which is good. I hope people are really taking this seriously. I personally feel well. I have been through the H1N1 epidemic several years ago, and other flu epidemics. I always got my vaccine. This, of course, is a different animal. I don’t want my friends and relatives to die from this. I do not want to.

REMEMBER: Shelter in Place. It is not a joke. Stay home when you do not need to go out, except to walk, run, etc. Walk your dogs. Oh, it stopped raining! Today it is snowing. But this will also stop and the sun will again come out. Eat healthy, get fresh air in your home when weather permits. Fresh air and sunshine are healthy.

And, stay safe, be well, cooperate. Believe in the higher powers. March 22, 2020

In recent months, Cldwaterr has been slowly been building a reputation for himself as one of Chicago’s more compelling hip-hop artists. With a knack for fierce deliveries, deeply personal lyricism and an ear for old school instrumentals, he has taken the genre back to its roots in a way that is fresh and imaginative. On his new single, “Has-Been,” he continues to build on these trends.

Produced by Sekani, The instrumental has “classy” written all over it. The vocal sample is extremely soulful with a ghostly twang to it, and the grumbling base and rhythmic percussion serve as nice complimentary pieces. The strings are absolutely gorgeous as well.

Cldwaterr brings the braggadocio on here, but he backs it up by showing he’s in top form. There’s an undeniably smooth sense of charisma in his delivery, yet he sounds hungrier than ever. His wordplay is more sharp and his bars even more direct than usual, showing an immense amount of progression in just a short amount of time.

“Has-Been” is yet another example that Cldwaterr can appeal to hip-hop fans of all kinds. His old school beats and content-heavy rhymes are more than enough to appeal to a purist crowd, while his smooth sense of charisma should grab the ears of younger, more mainstream fans. With the universal appeal Cldwaterr has, he is definitely an artist who will be sticking around for a long time.

“Has-Been” is out now on all platforms. Stream it here: https://songwhip.com/song/cldwaterr/has-been

Follow Cldwaterr on Instagram @cldwaterr

(A multi-part series reflection on fellowship written by Lira Luis)

“Fellowship work in its manifold branches will come directly under the influence of an organic philosophy: organic architecture for organic life. At Taliesin this life will be lived with such sense of the Future as may belong to the present.” -Frank Lloyd Wright

Part 1 – Taliesin Fellowship

Most people, when they hear the word “fellowship” will define the word based on their own perceptions and situations in life. Cambridge Dictionary defines it in two ways:

1) “a friendly feeling that exists between people who have a shared interest or are doing something as a group”; or

2) a status within “a group of people or an organization with the same purpose”.

In moments of uncertainty, I find that fellowship is what gives predictability to an unknown future.

The first fellowship I worked towards was, after graduating from a 5-year institutionalized undergraduate architecture education at the University of Santo Tomas (College of Architecture and Fine Arts) in Manila, Philippines. Some of the most prestigious companies in the country acquire a list of recent graduates from my alma mater for their recruitment efforts. When they learned that I graduated with cum laude honors, they sent me offers of employment even before applying to get interviews. It was also during this time that I was researching for graduate schools and encountered Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship (that offered a Master of Architecture degree) from a book at the Thomas Jefferson Library of the US Embassy in Philippines. 

There were so many choices and my architecture future at that time was unknown and yet to be written, so I wrote to Richard “Dick” Carney, Director of Admissions of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture (FLWSA) who was also CEO/President of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation at that time, and sent my application that included a portfolio, letters of reference, and an essay on why I wanted to pursue the fellowship.

I worked towards the fellowship for the strong vision it offered and the platform of process on which I can create my path in architecture — primarily the vision of an apprenticeship not scholarship, based on a free individual work-experience under the influence of an organic philosophy; and secondarily the Master of Architecture degree. This is an excerpt from my essay application to the Taliesin Fellowship:

“I am very much interested to study at Taliesin for the purpose that I want to know more about the works of Frank Lloyd Wright. I believe that my architectural ideas are greatly influenced by his architectural concepts. I want to experience being an apprentice at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, and at the same time wish to earn the degree of Masters in Architecture.”

Lira Luis (inside dashed blue circle) at the Taliesin West Studio circa 1998.

When I started my graduate program in 1997, the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture (FLWSA) under the leadership of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, had just received its NAAB accreditation for this program. Twenty (20) years after June 17, 2000 when I earned my NAAB-accredited Master of Architecture degree, its spin-off independent company, the School of Architecture at Taliesin (SoAT) formed as a non-profit corporation on June 14, 2017 in Arizona, now faces an existential moment, its future uncertain. 

L-R: Terry Kerr (Adjunct Faculty at Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture), Lira Luis, Susan Jacobs Lockhart (daughter of Frank Lloyd Wright clients of a UNESCO World Heritage Site [Jacobs House] and Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation board trustee) during Lira’s graduation ceremony at Taliesin Hillside Theater in Spring Green, WI on June 17, 2000.)

When I first read the news of the decision of SoAT board to close and its later reversal of that decision, I held on to the vision of the Taliesin Fellowship that has become a part of me and a part of me has become a part of Taliesin, long after I had graduated (Lira Luis, Taliesin Breakaway, Wisconsin River Valley Journal, 1997):

It’s “Organic architecture for organic life… a life lived with such sense of the Future as may belong to the present (Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, 1932).”

So to my fellow members of the Taliesin Fellowship — original, legacy, past, present, and those who came simply for the experience, including those who consider it as family: The time you spent in Frank Lloyd Wright’s “organic classroom” remains with you. A part of you has become a part of Taliesin, and a part of Taliesin has become a part of you. No one can take that away (or close it) from you.

“Apprenticeship not Scholarship… should be the attitude of mind of the Fellowship (Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography, 1943, page 392).” 

Let’s reclaim the Taliesin Fellowship promise that out of its obscured present a brighter Future will come. The 21st century (and beyond) has room for the kind of Freedom Taliesin education has to offer.

(Up next: Part 2 – The RIBA Fellowship)

Lira Luis is a 2020 Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). She is principal architect at ALLL/Leapfrog Project, delivers presentations at national conferences named in the “Gold 100 Listing of the world’s largest and most successful trade shows” for the past 20 years. She organized and led the AIA national Practice Management’s (PMKC) A’19 session “Virtual Architectural Practice: Alternate Realities for the Emerging Gig Economy” and “Virtual Practices: The Impact of Technology and Transience on New Histories in Practice” partner program at the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial, subsequently co-authored a resulting white paper with AIA Trust “An Architect’s Guide to Virtual Practice” that reached more than 30,000 AIA members, and moderated the webinar “Virtual Architectural Practice – An Alternate Reality”. At A’16 Conference on Architecture she shared solutions about the gig economy and potential for Virtual Practices in “Rethinking the Workplace: Co-Working Spaces for Architects”. She brings more than 25 years of architecture experience and is emeritus chair of AIA national PMKC. After graduating from the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture (FLWSA), working in firms in the USA and abroad, earning NCARB certification, she runs a Virtual Practice on Blockchain Technology.

Today, Sunday,  is the first full day of the order to stay at home to fight the unseen enemy, the Novel Coronavirus and Covid-19. By order of Governor JB Pritzker, we must not leave our houses until April 07, unless it is for essential work, to go to the grocery or to help with a relative.

People I spoke with had reactions from “total overreaction” to “it’s about time.”

To me, it’s a bit fuzzy.  For instance, can a person leave their house and go to a park?  Will the parks remain open?   The city of Aurora closed its parks.  Will other towns and cities follow?  If you live in a house with a backyard closing a park is no big deal, but if you live in a highrise or an apartment building, then you might feel the walls closing in on you.

Of course, no Sunday services today for many thousands.  And no Sunday breakfast at the many pancake houses across the area.

The Catholic Church decided to speak from afar to its members, using church bells, an ancient but effective means of communication.

Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, is asking Catholic parishes to ring their church bells five times a day between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. This started Saturday.

Each of the five prayer times will be dedicated to a specific group particularly affected by the pandemic.

The groups are listed below:

9 a.m. – Prayer for those infected with the virus and all those who are ill

12 p.m. – Prayer for healthcare workers and those attending to the sick

3 p.m. – Prayer for first responders and essential workers

6 p.m. – Prayer for people of every nation and their leaders

9 p.m. – Prayer for those who have died today

Which bell tolls for you?

Which will?

The Covid-19  confirmed cases count keeps growing, statewide (1049) and nationally (33,695) and across the globe (343,021).

Science-based channels focusing on Covid-19:

Dr. John Campbell

MedCram

Isolation – a UK pensioner visiting his grandchild.

It is 6:18 am, Sunday morning, March 22nd.  I just woke up. I can hear birds singing outside my window.  It seems, somehow, incongruous to hear them. Like it’s a normal morning.

It’s most decidedly NOT a normal morning.  For the state of Illinois has been on lockdown since 5 pm last evening.  Not quite marshall law – not yet, anyway.

Coronavirus.  It’s getting to where I can’t bear to hear the word.  One tiny organism has completely changed the world in but a few short weeks. Last weekend came the shock of all bars and restaurants in the state having to close down.  This weekend, everyone in the entire state, save the “essential,” are being made to stay home for the next almost- three weeks.

What the hell will next weekend bring?

The U.S. currently counts almost 27,000 cases of COVID-19 (the incurable disease caused by the virus) and 350 dead.  Illinois’ contribution stands at 753 cases and 6 dead.

Entire countries are quarantined, and over 13,600 people have died world-wide as I write this.

This is, of course, to say nothing of the virus’s catastrophic effect on both the U.S. and global economies.

I am not a chickenshit person.  I’ve been through a lot in my life. But this – this thing – has me sore afraid.  I can’t concentrate.  I can’t sleep. Since I have several risk factors, all I can think of is getting the cursed virus and dying.  It has no vaccine and no cure.

Adding to my anxiety, and perhaps yours, is the open-ended-ness of this ordeal.  We simply have no idea when it will abate and we can return to whatever the hell “normal” will be by then.

Possible death, catastrophic job-loss, interruption of life as we knew it – these things aren’t going to go away like magic.  Or anytime soon.  The damage this virus has caused to the world economy alone will take months or even years to recover from.

I simply don’t know how to wrap my mind around this.  I am, basically, scared shitless.

I – we – can only hope and pray that sanity prevails, that all global citizens continue to act peaceably, and that someone, somewhere in this damaged world finds a cure for this scourge, or at least a vaccine.

When I woke up this morning,  I heard the birds and this song popped into my head:

Thank you for reading.  Comments to:  [email protected]

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Everything we do has meaning. To the highest degree it has meaning to ourselves as individuals. To a lesser degree, meaning to our position within our family and social circles, and society. We are each individual cells in the great organism we’ve classified as the human species.

There’s no doubt that coronavirus is deadly. We watch its body count rise daily with no certainty where it will stop. But as dangerous as that virus is to our bodies, doom and gloom is even more dangerous to our souls. And while most of us will avoid the least desirable outcome of coronavirus, our efforts to protect our bodies threaten to make none of us immune to doom and gloom.

It’s easy to get down. Even those of us who haven’t become sick can get mired in all that we’ve lost. Retirement funds. Jobs. Vacations. Baseball. That bar with the self-serve taps.

At some point – if it hasn’t already – the novelty of self-isolation and hours of Netflix will wear off. Humans are social creatures, and despite how we feel on rainy, cold mornings, we do better when we’re out in the world rather than holed up in our homes. We’re not moles.

How long do we have to keep this up? I’m not sure anyone knows, and those who might know are too wise to say.

When facing a worldwide pandemic, necessary isolation of an unknown duration, and loss of so many small things that bring us joy, what are we to do?

There’s only one thing to do: practice gratitude.

The current pandemic is scary. Even as we live through it, I find it hard to believe what we’re being asked to do. Kids can’t go to school? No concerts? Stay inside your house so you don’t catch a deadly disease or spread it to others?

This doesn’t even seem like real life.

But for today, this is real life. And tomorrow. And the day after that. And probably quite a few days after that.

Not all of us will make it through, but most of us will. Those of us who are healthy, relatively young, and have decent insurance have a better chance. One day life will return to normal for us.

And it’s that prospect of returning to normal where gratitude comes in.

What we’re experiencing now is an interlude. It’s that space between the life we were living and the life we’ll live in the future. And during this interlude we can mope, and worry, and fill ourselves with dread, and generally freak out, or we can use this break as a chance to take stock of our lives.

This pandemic is providing a chance for all of us to put things on hold. To do without. In America we’re being forced to do something that Americans hate to do: sacrifice.

But from that sacrifice may grow gratitude.

Life is so daily. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day challenges, struggles, and monotony of life, and forget the many things for which we should be grateful. But now that so many of those things have been taken from us, perhaps we’ll appreciate them more when they return.

Having dinner at your favorite pizza place. Watching your daughter play soccer. Helping your son with his math homework. Buying toilet paper. A cold beer, a hot dog, and organ music at Wrigley Field. Riding public transportation. Field trips.

Some of those things are fun. Some are a chore. But now that we can’t do any of them, maybe we’ll realize that they’re the real stuff in life, and to simply let them pass by without gratitude is letting our lives pass by. And if we can’t experience gratitude for the small things in our life, then how will we ever know what the large things are?

Thousands of people have died, and thousands more will die. Many of us will get sick, and almost all of us will worry. It’s dreadful.

But it’s also a gift. It’s a forced pause button that gives us the opportunity to reflect on ourselves, our loved ones, our world, and our existence. If we’re lucky, we’ll get to spend a lot of time with those people we love the most. And we’ll also gain an appreciation for many other things that we had to lose in order to discover how important they are to us.

I read an article that said the world will never be the same after this. The writer was talking about health policy, and governmental programs. But if we take this time to think about what we’ve loved and what we’ve lost, then we’ll never be the same either.

And for that, we should be forever grateful.

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SELF-ISOLATION, DAY 5

OK, I wasn’t going to complain, but… buying way more than you need, this is what is called

HOARDING.

I am cheating a little. This is the essay for tomorrow, March 21 but I came home from work and need to vent a little. So, please don’t tell anyone I am doing this.

Really, since humans are doing this and it happens frequently I am trying to understand this panic-hoarding people do. I suppose it is in some way understandable. It occurs when a previously unsuspected problem occurs, threatening a large portion of some particular area of the population. In this case, everyone is potentially affected.

But…listen to me, please (and I know probably very few people read my crap), there is enough food to go around. Food production has not stopped. Toilet paper production, I read in an online article, was being increased before the COVID-19 started to affect us, since manufacturers thought this might happen. I explained to a couple of stressed customers that there is enough of everything, that there is still a shortage of paper products because in the morning people come in and grab whatever came in during the night. One customer had a shopping cart overflowing and the bill was nearly $600! Judging by the amounts of various products she purchased, either she will be feeding an infantry company this weekend, or she is stockpiling for 3 months.

Some are bewildered. A gray-haired man, with an accent from maybe Eastern Europe, was trying to purchase the gallon jugs of water. He told me in broken English that his sister told him that the governor of this state said everything will close. He asked me 3 times if our store will stay open. And about gas stations. So, I explained as thoroughly as I could what the situation is and that we will stay open and that there is enough of everything. If everyone could somehow calm down and be willing to share, to let loose of the “death grip” on having more than enough so one does not have fear.

I looked in their faces and saw black, brown, tan, white; faces that smiled, were angry, were tired, were bewildered, were hopeful. I saw my ancestors in their faces. I saw America. Why can we not see this in each other and share the last loaf of bread?

Let us try all to do this together, to stay safe, be well, share.

March 21, 2020