Bite-sized Yoga and Giggles
As promised, here are two bite-sized yoga videos to help you begin rebuilding strength in your legs and core! Please think of these as offerings on the Corona Cafe menu—not as something that you must consume or else. And if you have suggestions for better or different menu items, please send them my way!
About a week ago, one of our members—artist and long-hauler Courtney G—shared a bit of her creative brilliance with me via email. With her permission, I’m passing it along to you. Corona Cafe, meet Long-haul Liz:
I love Courtney’s comic because she captures the ups and downs of long-haul Covid-19 so accurately and so playfully. I’m a firm believer in playing with adversity, anxiety, and angst. It’s way more fun than either running from it or smothering beneath it! For me, that playfulness often spills out in song. I’ve been plucking out a new tune on the piano (a parenting lament with a circus-y sound). I’m a newb when it comes to piano composition, but I’m not letting my lack of skill stand in the way, After all, playing is about the process, not the product!
What have you done lately that feels playful, creative, invigorating, or new? What do you hope to do?
Well, today I had my first banjo delivered! The culmination of equal parts impulsive whimsy and about a decade of idle longing. I got thrown a bit of cash for my birthday this month and decided NOT to joylessly channel it into bills and groceries, but instead treat myself for surviving the last five months intact. Hopefully it will also help me survive the approaching winter intact too as life becomes even more indoor.
One thing that’s been difficult about this illness is being constantly aware of all the things I can’t do as well as I used to, and feeling less capable and less autonomous - less full, and less whole - as a result. I thought the best way to counter that was to take up something entirely new, that gives my body and brain a whole new kind of functionality bit by bit that will long outlive the illness. Judging by how I “learned” the guitar twenty years ago I don’t imagine my technique will ever be worth anything (I still couldn’t tell you what the chords are called, because who currs!), but that frees me up to mess around and make sounds that feel good. Something with no time limits, deadlines, measures of success, only the satisfaction of learning something for its own sake, at my own pace, that might have my body and brain figuring out how to work together in a little more harmony again.
I really liked Courtney G's comic!