Kate McDowell on Storytelling

Digging Deep It's gardening time and covid-19 time, all at once. Today the winds are a constant whistle and howl here in the flat midwest, though yesterday it was warm and rainy. March is going out like a lion. This week, I came as I was. In the previous videos I had dressed up more or less as I would be for teaching. But, with so many home and emotionally exhausted, it felt more authentic to show up in my gardening clothes, clean faced, just to have a conversation. After all, this is for my friends as an audience, and they don't mind. Audience matters here. Though I've set these for public viewing in the thought that they might bring comfort to others, I mean this to be for those who have been friend enough to me to stay on Facebook. It's a wide swath of people from all across my life, family and childhood all the way to professional connections from this year. I had some requests to move the time for the West Coast folks, but in truth my energy is limited to

Here we are in March 2020, and if we had told ourselves that we'd be sheltering in place and wondering how to get to the grocery store a month ago, we would have looked at ourselves very oddly. And yet here we are. I've been trying some experiments with live video on facebook. It started this last weekend, when I couldn't sleep on Friday night. I just kept thinking about how much we need to spread the word about these brand new unfamiliar CDC safety protocols (trying not to catch the covid-19 virus, who is most vulnerable, how to wash our hands). And how, in most of human history, we spread the word just by telling each other. Some people just need to hear things from a friend. The first one was about reading the CDC guidelines, and being caring to each other and gentle with ourselves. I thought I might call it "Heard it From a Friend": The second one probably jammed too much in, but it was about soap, videos, people we know, and tenderness, and now I'