I’ve been thinking about this Portuguese word that expresses the somewhat melancholic feeling of incompleteness. It speaks to a feeling of thinking back on situations and feeling the absence of someone or something. It is the sense that you have moved away from a place or thing; the feeling of the absence of a set of particular and desirable experiences and pleasures once lived. Yet, simultaneously saudade also carries positive emotions about the future while still sensing that a thing we had before may never be experienced again.

I am writing to you from my home in Los Angeles on Day 14 of a self-quarantining and I have been thinking about “saudade” a lot. Past the early dizzying days of preparing for life quarantined at home, we are settling into the basics of cooking everyday and getting used to working in our pajamas. Now we are asking new questions. How will I stay healthy (mentally and physically) as I watch the world rapidly change around me? How will I keep my young child healthy (mentally and physically). I worry about my parents in Texas, my grandmother, and my relatives in Italy. Through it all, there is a feeling of “saudade,” a beautiful word for which there is no direct English translation.

Right now there is a real awareness of the small and big things around us. I have seen people walking in observation of the natural world around them – the birds, the flowers blooming, cloud formations in the sky. People are sharing seeds. My neighbor left batteries on our side step. We gave him a roll of toilet paper when the local stores were all out. Our interdependence is undeniable. And now that we have stopped the endless frantic movement we have called life, we have the space to stop and pay attention to another life that is and has been happening all around us. But that we had lost sight of. We see each other, our shared humanity. And once again, lovingly we pay attention to the natural world, the immense living organism we call Earth, with wonder and awe, knowing that we are part of its interdependent, ecological legacy.

Yet, underneath it all is a sense of “saudade” and grief. 

Nearly six weeks ago, we had a visitor come to the Netflix writer’s room of From Scratch. I invited her to hold space for our team as we delved deeper and deeper into the book to bring the story to screen. I understood that in telling one human story on a very large canvas it would touch aspects of all our personal stories, starting with the writers in the room. I felt each of us needed to be held up and supported in different ways as we did the work at hand. So Maria, my friend, advisor and healing practitioner came to see us. 

She said, “This story is needed now more than ever because the world is in pain.” Then, she said something that stuck with me. “No one alive on the planet has lived through a time like this.” Her words rang true somewhere deep inside. Again, this was more than five weeks ago, before Italy’s shut down. News of the virus was just starting to eek out from China. We were still trying to process the fires in Australia. The idea of a global pandemic had not fully entered anyone’s consciousness in America. Still, her words stuck with me. She was telling us, a group of writers, to stand grounded as storytellers with open, wild hearts as we met an ever changing world.

No one alive has seen a pandemic in the time of globalization. Let alone one that plays out digitally and in real time every day through handheld devices. We have not experienced the fear for the immediate health of our families and friends on this scale, ever. We have never had to cease having human contact. We have not had our systems threatened or had to stand in the stark reality that there is no safety net for the most vulnerable of our societies. This grief is palpable. We must acknowledge it. Name it. Call it. Speak it. We must do so so that we can be present for what is – the pain and joy in all its forms. Acceptance and naming is where, ultimately, we will stand in our greatest awareness, power and potentiality. It is where we can make a difference, first in our lives, and then in a world on the mend.

I’ll be writing more in the days and weeks to come. But for now, I want to simply begin at the beginning. I want to share some tips on how we might keep our souls healthy as well as cultivate and deepen our own resilience at this critical time. As someone who has spent much of the last nearly twenty years very aware of illness, vulnerability, uncertainty and grief, the one thing I can assure you is that our resilience is present with us each day. And while our awareness of it and connection to it will ebb and flow day-to-day, (Hello, we are human!) IT IS PRESENT. We just have to lean into it. 

So here are some ways to gently invite ourselves to plug into our own wellness and resilience. Because when the immediate day-to-day urgency of this painful moment in humanity is done, the world will need us to share our stories of resilience. We will need to tell the tale of what we did to see ourselves through. I know that as a writer, a mom, a sister and a friend. A day will come when we will rise from this pain, step into our open hearts and sing our song of survival. It will be a song for the people who will come behind us. Because, dare I say, that out of this time there may in fact come the potentiality for a kind and quality of abundance and love not previously seen. 

 Here are some wonderful tips for this time:

Create a new at-home, self care routine
Make an altar or create a sacred space
Make time to go outside, safely
Eat lunch and FaceTime with a friend
Lean into family time by creating one new shared family ritual 
Make time to slow down
Make time to respect our fellow citizens
Make time to respect the planet
Make time to feel all your feelings

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