It takes me a second to realize it’s an eagle and a muskrat. And that I’m witnessing something profoundly beautiful. And terrible. And therefore, awesome, in the truest sense of the word. They’re in Clapper’s hayfield, the one on the way to the cafe from the farm cleaved by the meandering stream. I remember that I’m allowed to slow down the car to watch. No one is speeding along the road to get annoyed with me these days. I pull over.

The muskrat and the eagle are in a battle. They both want the same thing: to live. One wants to escape, the other to feast. Ultimately, the brutality of the display: the flailing, rising in flight, crashing to the earth, is more than I can bear in my emotional state. I pull away and go back to the cafe, where I can distract myself with the labor of making yet another pot of soup.

The scene haunts me. Only seconds before it happened, the muskrat was probably having a good day. The sun was bright, the air was clear, the water fresh. And probably only seconds after, the eagle, too, was having a good day.

But they don’t think about whether they are having a good day. They don’t reflect on the instant it turns bad. They just exist in the moment. When there is warm sunlight and a full belly, that is the moment to bask, rest and play. And when hunger strikes or an enemy is near, that is the moment to hunt or flee.

I’ve never been very good in the moment. I like to scan the horizons, plan, think of new projects, crunch numbers. Or I analyze the past. The here and now is often pushed aside in favor of tomorrow and yesterday; the consequence of cramming a storyteller and an entrepreneur into the same brain.

But tomorrow and yesterday do so little to serve me these days of the pandemic. I try to think about re-opening the cafe, or how the farmers market will operate this summer, and I have no answers. I scan the news for clues, and still find no answers. There I experience only increased sadness as the death toll mounts, and increased rage as the stories unfold about our leaders’ hubris, incompetence and pettiness that stood in the way of preventing this.

Right now, in this moment, I am okay. Business is good. Bills are paid. Kids are happy. Mom and Dad are well. The work I’m doing isn’t the work I planned, still it engages my mind and tires my body enough to fall into bed at night with gratitude. But I can’t let go of how precarious it all is. In the next moment, it could all change. Someone could get very sick. Someone I love could have to die alone. Equally distressing is that right now, in this moment, someone else is very sick. Someone else is dying alone, deprived of loved ones for the safety of humanity.

I’ve trained my mind to find opportunity and grace in just about any situation. And here, in these days where Bob and I meet up with friends online for virtual cocktail hours, where the kids are joyous in their farm labor, where Mom and Dad are daily with their grandchildren, where our business has been able to be of service to our community, there has been so much opportunity and so much grace. But I’m struggling to reconcile this with the widespread suffering and my anger. I am struggling with the guilt that my comfort and safety are a result of my privilege.

I don’t know what to do with it all, except think of the muskrat and the eagle, and try to be in the moment. Because the moment is where the soup cooks, and the kids study, and the chicks discover their first bugs, the pigs feast, and the sheep graze. The moment is where we adapt to the situation at hand, keeping our tiny stretch of the food web functioning and serving as the industrial system falters and chokes, shutting down slaughterhouses, plowing over crops and laying food to waste while people go hungry. The moment is where I feel useful within this chaos. The moment is where I can push aside the sense of futility. The moment is where I can ignore my self-hatred for the wall of self-defense I’ve erected to protect myself from taking on more than I can give. The moment is where I can celebrate that mine is work rooted in optimism: roots, soil, growth, rebirth, abundance, connection.

So that’s where I’m learning to be. I meditate and mentally send roots into the earth, grounding myself to the soil beneath my feet. I look for sun, I watch the birds. I play with the cats and talk to the dogs. And then I make my prayers that we will come through this smarter and stronger and kinder, and I go back to work. I push aside my guilt over my comparative safety, comfort and privilege in favor of gratitude for my tiny place in the chain of solutions. I try to keep in mind that both the eagle and the muskrat have good moments in their days, no matter what happens in the end. And it’s the good moments that fuel the spirit and the body to tackle whatever comes next. So I accept them.