Sunday morning April 5th 2020. i do not really know where i am. This life we are living now is like no life i've lived before. My old normal is in disarray. And my new normal is a most peculiar space. On Thursdays at 8pm we clap the NHS staff and other essential workers. People step out into the street after days of being sequestered and clap, some bang saucepans and holler. We hover about in our front gardens a bit awkwardly and say hello to people at mans length distance for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and then go back inside. I am not sure about the clapping. It makes me feel odd. I do it. I understand on some level. But also i don't know, i feel like its a thing that could either become something good or something dark, a way for people to obliviate the reality of what is going on. The clapping and hurrays don't feel like they compensate for the fact that staff in the NHS are going into this crisis without proper protective equipment or means to do the job but i worry that they might be used as cover for that fact. We are led by a government that seems to see old people and weak people as expendable. People who die with underlying conditions are somehow marked as acceptable deaths, they might have died anyway. A five year old died yesterday, but they had underlying conditions so that little boy or girl's death is brushed to one side as unusual and therefore not such a big deal. It is a big deal. Every death is a big deal. Even the deaths of those who are seemingly unloved. Death is an end. Death by numbers makes those ends seem more palatable, but the end of a life is a big deal. 
I am being political, boring on, i know, if anyone is reading this they will likely have stopped already. And as i will be handing in my blog as my reflective journal for my MA course my tutors may ask what does this have to do with your course ? The thing is that my work whether it is my work as an artist or my work as a shiatsu practitioner is born out of my life. It isn't something outside of myself, it is me immersed in the world i am living in. In safe normal circumstances i can take myself off into flights of fancy explore a story from inside that story, endeavour to live it, but we are not living in safe normal circumstances. Suddenly we are all possibly carrying a killer disease, we want to see our families but we don't want to because if we are carrying infection we don't want them to catch it from us. In the street eyes are cast down and if we see someone on the path before us we'll cross the road or step out into the road to maintain what we've been told is safe distance. Is it safe distance ? 
Our social intercourse is changing as result of the corona virus. People who are pushy or who get too close are threatening. It is changing the way we dress, i tie back my hair to go to the supermarket, might cover my face with a scarf if i'm in close proximity to others, i am sure that fashion designers will make beautiful masks for at least one season of haute couture, and at home with no one to see me i wear no make up, tho i still shave my legs. Funny the things that seem to matter. 
It is another of the strangenesses, as those whose work is not essential, or whose work can be done at home, find themselves closer to themselves than maybe they have been since they were very small, we are being stripped of pretence in this new life, who we are is exposed, what we need is revealed and it can be disconcerting. I find i am someone who needs to dissolve in order to reflect and assimilate my new circumstances, to become part of, to let go, to feel my way through the new world i'm inhabiting. My concentration is shot to pieces. My focus terrible. But i have managed to turn my compost heap and having sifted the end bin i have 6 big sacks of beautiful friable compost for potting, mulched two flower beds with the clinker and have four small sacks of twigs for fires or barbecue lighting. Nature is my medicine. The flowers, the birds, the over-half moon milky white in a bright blue sky yesterday afternoon, the sunlight streaming through the trees when i opened the back door to let the cat in in the morning, the robin just inches away from me grub gathering. I notice how much i miss walking in the countryside, i envy my country friends their country walks. 
Again what does this have to do with reflective journalling ? does it need to have anything to do with reflective journalling ? what the hell is reflective journalling if it is not this ? I guess this sojourn in isolation is also giving me time to step back from thinking like a student. That thought process is never quite natural because there are so many holes to squeeze through. In ordinary times it is, i guess, a game. Starting point, finishing point. I began my MA with snakes and ladders as my manifesto. I have just slipped down a snake. The new requirements needed to pass the modules i'm doing at the moment feel hard, feel like a different course. The university has no other way of reviewing our work and we have no choice but to submit what we can but it is going to be difficult to show the mass of work i've produced well and with my current lack of focus i am struggling to find a way through the tick box maze. I hope that i will find a way to hit the level needed to pass. I feel sad about not handing in a physical portfolio, its a small sadness on the scale of things but still a sadness i want to acknowledge. 
An because I came to my MA wanting to learn physical skills I have had to decide that i cannot do my final term online. Its been a hard decision to make. It was my first response, and then i wondered if maybe i could, and then i wondered if that was what i really wanted, and in the end i have had to make a choice. Life is full of choices, some are more marked than others, some we do not realise will make a massive difference until later when we look back and know that that moment changed the course of our lives, or someone else's and therefore ours too because our actions do not stand in isolation. We are part of a greater whole. I think it this that this virus is teaching me and maybe that is why i am needing to step back from university at the moment because i have a teacher that is asking me to learn in ways that are more imperative than school. i hope to return to school in the future but my now is asking me to meet it untethered.