Reporting from China: Another Call for Higher Love

I've just returned from a date with the Denson's. Dinner "out on the (ghost) town" felt like a real event given the way we've been laying so low this week. We first went to a Hong Kong-style eatery named Gaga Garden, only to walk in and find that it was closing for the night. It felt like this ...

I don't know how to smize very well, but I think it's clear that I can pout with my eyes. This look did nothing to convince Gaga to stay open an extra hour. Ho Hum.

We ventured a bit further into Seaworld and this led us to Baia, a restaurant owned by a couple of European men that serves "upper-scale" food. I had the best meal that I have had in three weeks, the amount of time that I been Candida cleansing. Alli, Charles and I had the entire restaurant to ourselves -- we did choose to eat outside in the open fresh air.

I'm ever so grateful to be a third wheel with this duo. These two are my kind of happy hour.

The fine dining dinner did feel well-deserved after finishing our first week of online teaching and learning -- as an online educator now, I am definitely learning about how to reach all of my students through various modes. Altogether, though, it seems the instruction has generally been effective this week, and I do feel connected to my students, even from a distance.

While I have worked to separate church and state, for the most part, going to school and to Buttery to type out lesson plans and send audio feedback to my kids, yesterday I decided to work from home in the afternoon. .

Mom has always said, watch your children when they are sleeping (because when they are being pills while awake you'll be able to remember that they have sweet moments).

While my new routine has begun to feel quite comfortable, my heart feels weighted with how some of the world continues to respond to the new virus that came out of a city in China that was hardly on most people's maps until last week.

My friend and her family decided to fly home while we are not physically in school. The neighbors caught wind of my friend's family's arrival and interrogated her mother about where my friend and her family had been exactly. The neighbor was worried that her child, with a more compromised immune system, might catch the virus from the family just home from China. While I think we can empathize with a mother's fears for her child, her call to my friend's mother wreaked of ignorance.

My sense of the world's perception of the virus is that it has gotten the stigma it seems to have because it came out of a wet market in a country that doesn't have "great relations" with the US. A wet market is particularly foreign in a way that incites disgust, perhaps, and misunderstanding along cultural lines.

John Pomfret, for The Washington Post, writes, "At a middle school a few blocks from my house, a rumor circulated among the children that all Asian kids have the coronavirus and should be quarantined. Misinformation has also reached higher education: In college campuses across the United States, some non-Asian students have acknowledged avoiding Asian classmates for no other reason than, well, the coronavirus came from Asia."

This is rough stuff: xenophobia, ignorance, and baseless assumptions. To look at someone as a walking virus is to deny a person the very humanity that should lead us to care more deeply for one another.

I know, though, that it's not the whole story. I know there are communities of us working to share truth and love and open our arms to one another.

And here is when I put in another plug for you to join the #internationalhigherlovedanceteam. I have a handful of videos so far from friends and family, and it would be amazing to muster up more, of everyone dancing to Higher Love. Do whatever your soul moves you to do as Whitney belts out:

Think about it, there must be a higher love

Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above

Without it, life is wasted time

Look inside your heart, and I'll look inside mine

Things look so bad everywhere

In this whole world, what is fair?

We walk the line and try to see

Falling behind in what could be, oh

Bring me a higher love

Bring me a higher love, oh

Bring me a higher love

Where's that higher love I keep thinking of?