Working from home has been hard. I do most of my writing at home, although sometimes I like to go to a library or coffee shop for a change of scenery, but for my day job that pays the bills I have to go to an office. Or I did until local reports of people testing positive for COVID-19 came in and the message was sent to all staff to work from home. Even before it started I felt anxious about it and it didn’t help that the politicians who have exacerbated the problem by pretending it wasn’t a concern or was “fake news” until the stock market started dropping continued to make misleading or outright false statements while dragging their feet and trying to rewrite history with blatant lies like “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
So one day my wife and I took a walk along a local greenspace and I saw this:
Art can be therapeutic, and there were a lot of things about this that made me feel better. My eye was immediately drawn to the Eye of Horus, or wadjet, at the top in the center. The wadjet was used as a protective glyph, often worn or placed on the bodies of pharaohs to protect them in the afterlife, and added to the bows of ships. And yet, having studied Egyptian mythology, I wonder about why they chose that particular symbol. Horus, like most of the Egyptian gods, is pretty much indifferent to humanity’s struggles. The gods mostly fight among themselves and their interventions in the mortal world are few. On the other hand Horus did defeat his evil uncle Set, who’d murdered Horus’s father Osiris, so anything associated with Horus could be prophylactic.
The jumble of works below is interesting too. I couldn’t get any closer—well, I could, but I’d have needed a small boat thanks to all the rain we’ve had recently. March is supposed to come in like a lamb and at this point I think it’s going to go out like a mudskipper, but that’s another story. I’ve noticed that there’s honor among graffiti artists; usually they won’t paint over each others’ works. Since I couldn’t get close I couldn’t tell if anything had been painted over, but I like to think they’d just been playing an enormous game of Exquisite Corpse.
I’m gonna stick with that thought. It makes me feel good, and there are advantages to not being able to get too close.
I love that Mel Brooks clip.
Stay home….
Save the comedians!
We need laughter now more than ever. And when things get better we’ll need laughter then too.
This all makes me feel closer to you, Chris. You and Mel Brooks are treasures, even at a distance.
You’re a treasure too, Ann, and I treasure your input.