The People’s Issue
“I DON’T SEE US GOING BACK TO THE OLD WORLD. I THINK THAT WE’RE IN THE MIDST OF ACCELERATED CHANGE AND THAT WE’RE MOVING IN THE DIRECTION OF CREATING A NEW WORLD”
By ALEXANDRIA HAECHLER, ELANA FRANKEL, DONNA FELLENBERG, BARBARA DE VRIES, ESTER DE JONG, LYNNE O’NEILL Photography NICHOLAS ROUTZEN, CAELUM ROGERS, ABIGAIL WAGNER, SHAYNA LOHMANN
Photography NICHOLAS ROUTZEN
Set On Fire, We Rise Anew By ALEXANDRIA HAECHLER
IT WAS OCTOBER 31ST, 2019, WHEN I FOUND OUT. As the neighborhood kids zoomed up and down our stoop, costumed and looking for candy, I smiled in unusual solidarity because this year, I too, had on a costume of sorts: one that hid from the world my newest identity of “mother.” I was pregnant, just two months after my husband and I had started trying to conceive. The news was both shocking and delicious—a personal trick-or-treat.
By the time the new year arrived, I was running on pure excitement. I had made it through the first trimester of unrelenting sickness and exhaustion, and now, we were about to share our life-altering secret with our nearest and dearest friends. As my husband and I sat around watching the snowfall coat our tiny piece of the Catskills, we exchanged our visions for the new year. 2020 seemed so bright to us then: a year full of promise and new beginnings, of shedding tired identities and stepping into new ones, of unimaginable love.
But soon, at five months pregnant, I was ordering masks for us to wear whenever we set foot in public. All over the world, people were dying. Grocery stores sustained bare shelves for weeks. In New York, laboring mothers were lawfully separated from their partners, forced to bring their babies into this world unsupported and alone. The unimaginable had happened: our current non-stop world had seemingly stopped, and I didn’t see how it could get much worse.
It was early March then. Shelf-stable pantry items filled our home to the brim as if it were a wartime bunker. A perverse uncertainty hung in the air. I was a new mother with no answers. My dreams for my baby’s future had turned into nightmares overnight. What would a global pandemic mean for my baby’s health? And, what could I do to protect him? What would the world that he was going to be born into even look like in four months? Would he and I be safe? Perhaps naively, these were questions that I had never thought to ask. I wondered what kind of mother that made me. After all, if I didn’t have the answers and couldn’t protect my own son, wasn’t it just as naive to assure myself that all he really needed was me, his mother?
As nationwide quarantined days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, my son and I grew together while our country fell further apart. Inexcusable police brutality unjustly took the lives of Black Americans Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd within a span of three months. All 50 states erupted into protests—some of which devolved into the looting of already struggling neighborhood businesses. In contrast, others staggeringly escalated into law enforcement macing, tear-gassing and beating law-abiding, peaceful protestors. Our country was in pain. You could see it bleeding all over the news.
Our nation’s future seemed as murky to me as my son’s. As a country, we were flooded with questions. Was it possible that we could have turned a blind eye to the systemic racism that had been poisoning this country for decades? Who was going to ensure justice for the Arbery, Taylor, and Floyd families? If we couldn’t put our trust in the police—the very people whose job it is to “serve and protect”—who could we trust? Our country was as lost as a mother as I was.
But, it takes a fire to rise from the ashes, and soon, some chose not to let the chaos paralyze them. Instead, we cried for our nation to recognize that teaching our children to be color-blind is not the answer because the denial of race doesn’t eradicate racism, it eradicates the conversation altogether. We called for defunding the police force to reallocate funds to social services committed to reducing crime and violence through programs that focus on mental health, addiction, and homelessness. We chanted “Black Lives Matter”— on the streets and our podcasts and social media channels.
Birth and rebirth offer us the unique opportunity to start anew— whether it’s as an infant, as a mother, or as an entire nation— but to begin again, we must be willing to change. The journey is messy, unpredictable, and littered with questions. However, what I’ve gleaned over these past few months as an expectant mother observing an expectant country, each of us lost, yet hopeful to be reborn too, is this: it is precisely in uncharted times like these when mothers are needed most. A mother’s power, you see, doesn’t lie in her knowing all the answers or protecting us from hardships at all costs. It lies in her enduring commitment to simply showing up. We channel it every time one of us faces the fire and takes to the streets to protest for our fellow man’s rights. We draw on it each time one of us reaches out to our communities for help. And perhaps, we harness it best when we make masks for one another in the middle of a global crisis, when we petition our state representatives to recognize the rights of birthing women and to obtain justice for those of us whose lives were inexcusably taken too soon, and when we hold our newborn babies in our arms and say, “I’m here.” ▪
Photograph NICHOLAS ROUTZEN
“OUR COUNTRY WAS IN PAIN. YOU COULD SEE IT BLEEDING ALL OVER THE NEWS.”
The Essential PlantBy ELANA FRANKEL
FOR THREE MONTHS, I was an essential temp worker in an upstate New York dispensary. As the world shut down and hibernated, I got up every morning and drove almost an hour for an 8 a.m.–to–3 p.m. shift, four days a week. Masked and gloved, I supported patient intakes, orders, curbside pickup, and deliveries.
My coworkers, mostly locals, believe as I do, that cannabis is medicine. And since New York state allowed sales of medicinal marijuana to continue, we soldiered on. There was no glamour, no high-end CBD skin-care lines, no cameras, no reporters, and no one sending us free lunches.
In those three months, the phone never stopped ringing. From the moment I walked in the door to way after my shift, people were desperate to make contact. What I heard over and over: “Can cannabis help me with anxiety? Chronic pain? Sleep disruption?” These were the three most common side effects of lockdown life. I spoke with men and women, young but mostly older, hoping to calm their fears. Was there enough medicine to ride out lockdown and help with their pain and suffering?
I fielded calls from a woman who had been struck by lightning (cannabis calmed her post-electrical muscle spasms), a granddaughter who asked if we sold THC, THCa, CBD, CBG, and CBN as separate tinctures (her Australian relatives sent her a very specific formula to help cure her grandmother’s cancer), and a man whose wife had just left him, and who was responsible for the care of his elderly COVID-19 positive parents. I can still recall his voice as he broke down on the phone. There were vets and retired cops, mothers and daughters, caregivers, and older parents.
There were people of every race; gay, straight, and transgender people; vocal conservatives and passionate liberals. Every day, I watched as my coworkers figured out a curbside-pickup flow in a parking lot that was too small even to accommodate delivery trucks.
They maintained their composure when someone would call and ask how to work a vape pen. The pharmacists calmly listened to patients and made recommendations. My favorite coworkers were the ones who skillfully maneuvered the state’s unintuitive website, making sure specific certifications were in order and cards were up to date (and initiating the dreaded recertification process when something expired).
For me, fielding emotional calls became an exercise in empathy versus sympathy, or really putting myself in another’s shoes versus simply feeling bad
for her. Some days after my shifts, I would call my friend Dr. Junella Chin for a sanity check. A medical practitioner who takes a holistic approach to cannabis therapeutics, she would remind me about the importance of diet, regular meditation, and restorative sleep. Sometimes we would talk about deep breathing practice. I felt comfort in the fact that I wasn’t alone.
On the contrary, millions of people are in isolation because of COVID-19. It has broken up families, claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, and completely disrupted our daily rituals and debilitated our mental health. Already 20 states have pushed to reclassify cannabis as an essential medicine. And dispensaries, like the one I worked at, have quickly adapted. People are changing too. Together we are realizing that maybe, just maybe, marijuana isn’t that bad after all and that it could be an effective way to cope with a multitude of problems, including the stress and anxiety related to the aftershocks of the pandemic. We are realizing that we can use cannabis and practice commerce with a good conscience by acknowledging that the goal of self-care and health care is, oftentimes, just finding relief. ▪
Be Like NonnieBy DONNA FELLENBERG
DISEASE MAKES ME ANXIOUS. Even when my son was little and got sick, my husband would take care of him as I stood in the doorway, wringing my hands. You can imagine what COVID did to me. When I heard about the virus back in December, a shiver of panic went through my gut.
Yet, amid this horrifying pandemic, I found peace and enjoyment in my everyday existence. Yes, I watched the news with alarm. People were suffering and dying all over the world, and the experts couldn’t decide if we should wear masks or not. Our government reassured us that the virus would magically go away, and the CDC said that young people were safe. There was no one to trust completely. We were on our own.
During these dastardly times, I happened on a Facebook video captured before COVID, about a 107-year-old woman who lived independently in Connecticut. She went grocery shopping by herself and made big, old-fashioned Italian Sunday dinners for her huge extended family. They called her “Nonnie.” In a video flashback to five years earlier, she blew out candles for her 102nd birthday, and her false teeth flew out of her mouth! In that moment no one laughed harder than Nonnie, who was as un-self-conscious as one could be. She was a revelation. I decided I needed to be like Nonnie.
Every day I would set out to do more: garden more, cook more, do more with my life—and always keep on the move. This made my husband very happy!
I stopped coloring my hair and let my freak flag fly. I also had the benefit of spending over two months with my 30-year-old son, Miles, and his girlfriend, Alice, who came down from a deserted Boston. I learned how to navigate GarageBand with their help. They are superb pianists, so there was always music in the house. We played board games, badminton, and croquet. I baked, I cleaned, and I felt immense gratitude for my life every day. We cooked and ate our meals together. We went on hikes and were in constant conversation. My heart ached from time to time because of what was happening in our world, and my body was sore from constant movement, but I have never felt more alive.
My 98-year-old mother was not as fortunate. Half-blind, half-deaf, and bedridden, Mother was spending her days alone in a nursing home in Florida. I couldn’t let my panic run me, so my inner Nonnie took over. Like Nonnie, I had a schedule for each day, and I stuck to it. I bought my mother a new phone so that she could hear me better, and I made her laugh. I searched the internet and sent her a handheld poker game so that she had something to do.
Life is hard, but I’m exquisitely aware of how good I have it. As time goes by, I will look back at this period of sadness, death, and destruction throughout the world with enormous sorrow for all that has been lost. But I’ll also remember that this was when I witnessed, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, humans capable of growing, changing, and becoming better versions of themselves. People have done extraordinary, heroic things during the time of COVID. I did nothing heroic. But when I needed a stronger, better version of myself, I took my cue from a 107-year-old Italian lady. ▪
Photography CASSANDRA ROGERS
“MY HEART ACHED FROM TIME TO TIME BECAUSE OF WHAT WAS HAPPENING IN OUR WORLD, AND MY BODY WAS SORE FROM CONSTANT MOVEMENT, BUT I HAVE NEVER FELT MORE ALIVE.”
Photography SHAYNA LOHMANN
The PsychicInterview by LYNNE O’NEILL
Kevin Melville Jennings is a psychic, astrologer and tarot master, who’s been featured in international publications, on national television and has written an astrology column for Vogue.com. For 30 years, Kevin has led a meditation group based on the Western Mystery Tradition. Kevin is also included in the book, “Apples Are Square: Thinking Differently About Leadership.” He and his partner John McDonald lived in New York City and bought a house upstate in Sullivan County near the Delaware River 20 years ago.Lynne O’Neill: Kevin, you’re a well known psychic, tarot master and astrologer, and you’ve been my psychictherapist and friend for the last 30 years. When did you realize that you had this gift?
Kevin Jennings: For me, it wasn’t so much realizing that I had a gift. It was realizing that others didn’t have it in the same way that I did. It was a kind of gradual process of realizing that I had certain abilities that had been with me since birth. I was also very lucky and fortunate to have supportive parents who believed in my gifts. I got my first pack of tarot cards when I was 11, and I hung them on the wall by my bed. So I immersed myself in them each morning. They were the first thing I saw when I awakened, and at night, the last thing I was looking at as I was falling asleep.
LO: Was it tarot cards that you were drawn to? Or were you just, you know, psychic?
KJ: It started really with pre-cognitive dreams. I would have very vivid dreams. And when I woke up, I would
tell my mother what I had dreamt, and then a few days or a few months later, the dream that I had had would come true. So that’s how it really began. And then I began to realize that I had certain intuitions and intimations.
LO: In my experience, the way you work is very unique in your field. Can you talk about what happens during a session with a client and your method?
KJ: I try to talk to the client and understand their concerns and what they would like me to focus on. And usually, during this session, we’ll begin with checking in with their astrological chart. Then from that move to doing some tarot work together. By and large, the feedback that I get is that people tell me that they feel clearer after a session. And I consider that a great tribute to the work. Because clarity of consciousness is essential for understanding and for decisive decision making, as well as the imaginative and creative dreaming process of envisioning ourselves toward the future. I also believe that it helps someone more to assist them toward their own unique revelation rather than me talking at them. So I do a lot of active listening. My work is very experiential and process-oriented.
LO: In these difficult and uncertain times, what are people talking to you about? And how do you respond? I’m sure you’re getting a lot of similar questions, right?
KJ: Oh, yes. It’s an extraordinary time. And just about everybody seems to be somewhere on the spectrum of grief. There’s a lot of grief work that is going on and understanding and holding someone in their grief. Grief is such a complicated emotion. It’s up. It’s down. It’s angry. It’s sad. It’s desolate. I hold my clients energetically in their grief, and I try to remember that grief refines the soul.
LO: In what way?
KJ: I think grief knocks away our hard edges and knocks away at our ego. I think grief puts us in touch with a whole other level of understanding and a whole other feeling for life.
LO: Do you have any insights into the future of COVID-19 and the possibility of a vaccine and treatment?
KJ: A client of mine who lives in Switzerland recently wrote to me and said, ‘Do you remember when I was in New York, and we had a session, and you were talking to me about the Saturn-Pluto conjunction on January 12, 2020?’ And then she said, ‘You referred to it as a seeding time for a new chapter in the world.’ I hadn’t remembered saying that, but I do feel that part of the energy of this is that it’s a restructuring of society and the world. From an astrological point of view,
I feel that the sort of marker we have was this powerful conjunction of Saturn and Pluto that happened this past January. That happens to be the conjunction that seemed to coincide with the emergence of COVID-19. But it’s still mysterious to me. I think we’re going to be dealing with this for quite some time. I don’t think that this is something that is a brief moment. Traditionally, the conjunction of Saturn and Pluto represents the beginning of a new 34-year cycle.
Now, I certainly don’t think that we’re going to be dealing with this for 34 years, but I think we’ll be dealing with this and how this changes us going forward. I don’t see us going back to the old world.
Photography CASSANDRA ROGERS
I think that we’re in the midst of accelerated change and that we’re moving in the direction of creating a new world. There’s a very bright conjunction, very powerful that happens on the winter solstice this year, which involved Saturn again. Saturn is structure and form and manifestation. And this time, Saturn will be in conjunction with Jupiter, which is very expansive and philosophical. So I would expect that something that starts to be quite good begins to emerge from this. I feel very hopeful about an effective vaccine and treatment. And it would be interesting to see if there’s something significant that happens toward
the end of the year with an announcement or some kind of breakthrough in helping people infected with COVID-19.
LO: Okay, now, I’m sure everyone wants to know this. Any feelings about the presidential election?
KJ: Well, let me say this. Believe this or not, I feel it’s too soon to tell. I feel like despite what the polls are saying that the candidates are neck and neck in terms of support. I am concerned about the actual election day because we’ll just be on the final day of a Mercury retrograde period, and it will be the day before Mercury goes direct. So it’s possible that there could be communications that are difficult.
I remember back in 2020, and we were also voting during Mercury retrograde. Mercury had stationed.
The difference was, Mercury was turning retrograde. This time Mercury is getting ready to go direct. So maybe things will be forward moving. But remember the 2000 election. There were so many problems counting the ballots and the phenomenon of the hanging chads. So I’m concerned about communications and vote count on the actual day of the presidential election.
LO: Last question. Do you sense that the boom to move upstate in recent years is going to continue?
KJ: I do think it’s going to continue. And the reason I do is that I think again, we’re dealing with deep structural shifts in society. I mentioned earlier the Saturn-Pluto conjunction that begins the 34-year cycle. I think that the period that we’re emerging into and why living in the country is going to become more important is that people are going to be looking for a more balanced lifestyle — the word is, in fact, holistic. People want to be more integrated. Before we led up to COVID, it seemed like in the last four or five years, that there was a tremendous acceleration of people working all the time and feeling like there was no time to enjoy life. I think a greater emphasis is going to be placed on not just career and professional status, but also enjoying life and finding beauty. And I feel that that’s why the move to upstate is going to continue and that the continuation of this will be steady in terms of its progression. I think that for many people, it will offer the ability to feel like they’re living a more balanced life. ▪
Photography ABIGAIL WAGNER
“I LIVE FROM MAKING MEALS AND CLEANING THE KITCHEN AND ORDERING AND COLLECTING FOOD FROM PARKING LOTS WHERE MASKED PEOPLE TRY TO GO ABOUT WITH A PURPOSE.”
4 PM on a Friday By BARBARA DE VRIES
IT’S ALWAYS 4 PM, AND IT’S ALWAYS FRIDAY. The rest of time drifts in between. I do not live from Zoom to Zoom, I live from impulse to impulse.
From checking the New York Times and Washington Post several times a day, as if I’m looking for something that can’t be found. Good news? Bad news? Or a pinch to remind myself that it’s all real and not just another Murakami story—the writer whose tales of parallel universes calm me down and assure me that reality is an unreasonable expectation.
Several times a day, I wander into my garden and watch my vegetables grow. I’m more interested in their process than their outcome. I feel at one with them and wonder if they’re getting enough sun. Am I getting enough sun? I can’t seem to get beyond the clouds.
I live from making meals and cleaning the kitchen and ordering and collecting food from parking lots where masked people try to go about with purpose.
I disinfect. I wash my hands. I walk the dog. I clean the dog. I feed the dog. I feed the husband. I feed my daughters. I cook the same things over and over: chicken, grilled, baked, sautéed, fried, salmon, baked with lemon, teriyaki, mayo, onions, or basil, shrimp every which way, potatoes, rice, pizza, pasta, noodles, couscous, mango, avocado, salads of many colors. I pickle cucumbers with cilantro from my garden.
Four months. 125 days. 120 dinners? 240 cocktails? Whiskey sour—as per Stanley Tucci—martinis with lychee, mandarin, olive, lemon, lime, and a twig of mint (or vodka shots) sometimes in the afternoon just because I can.
At dinner we laugh, we fight, we cry, sometimes we play games. We wash our dishes by hand (because the dishwasher broke). We argue over who ate the last cookie. Sometimes we watch movies together, but mostly we retreat. The girls laughing, quarreling, whispering upstairs, or outside in the dark, huddled. Their cellphones light up their faces as they rate pictures of guys on Hinge. Safe and socially distanced dating. My heart aches. Where is their Mister Darcy? We joke, as bored boys race up and down the road on their RTVs.
We have parties and dress up. We dance at the end of 14 days in quarantine. We hunt for treasures on Easter Sunday. We make art and write love poems for Mother’s day, Father’s day, and the twins’ birthday. The house goes from being my coat to being my armor. I feel bare leaving it behind. Twice, I drive into New York and back. I return depleted. The cars, the people, the violence of the speed at which we travel past one another. Coming home makes me happy. The thought of never leaving again makes me happier still. I watch two cardinals build a nest and try to stop the squirrel from eating their eggs. I wait for the pair to return, but they don’t. In one day, we have a wasp infestation, the septic backs up, and my husband has emergency oral surgery. I didn’t think that Mercury in retrograde could happen in the time of corona.
I think I will stop thinking thoughts. Let them drift freely from 4 till 4 and Friday to Friday. ▪
PortraitsBy ESTHER DE JONG
MARCH IS THE MONTH I START TO LONG FOR the first signs of spring. But this year March was unlike any other. The pandemic hit New York City, which is close to home here in the Catskills. Many of my friends have homes in both places. Soon some of my friends and I got sick, but at that time none of us could get tested because we had not been to China or Italy and didn’t know someone with a confirmed positive test result. Besides that, our rural county did not have any testing centers. I gave up pretty quickly on that round of calls that led to nowhere. A few months later I heard one of my friends tested positive for the antibodies.
When I got sick, I pulled my 13-year-old daughter, Erin, out of school, just before it closed. It was extremely upsetting for her, and she was stressed out about getting behind in her schoolwork. She wanted to say goodbye to her friends and was very angry with me because I would not let her go. But eventually, she was able to accept her new reality and jumped into online schooling without a problem.
For weeks it was just the three of us, my husband, my daughter, and me. We saw no one, lived mostly in separate rooms, and did not go to a store. We lived on our provisions that we always have in case of bad winter weather, and also relied on close friends who braved the supermarket to get us fresh dairy and veggies. We just Zoomed away, trying to stay connected to family and friends, and continued school and work online as best we could.
Not knowing what was going to happen was terrifying. I was supposed to fly to Amsterdam to visit my parents in my hometown, Maassluis, and then travel to Germany to visit my brother and meet my nephew for the first time. My ticket was a birthday gift from my husband, and I was very sad not to go. To this day I still don’t know when I’ll see my family again. I often wonder if I’ll end up like one of my friends and attend the funeral of a parent via Skype from thousands of miles away.
“I LIVE FROM MAKING MEALS AND CLEANING THE KITCHEN AND ORDERING AND COLLECTING FOOD FROM PARKING LOTS WHERE MASKED PEOPLE TRY TO GO ABOUT WITH A PURPOSE.”
I soon began to devote more time to my art. I have been painting since 2004, after moving to the U.S. to study at the National Academy of Design in NYC. Now, to take my mind away from the unknown, I focused on painting my family and friends. That way they could be a bit closer to me. I was studying portraits of Frans Hals, the famous Dutch painter from the Golden Age, and was inspired to first paint my daughter and my husband. After that I painted my parents and then my brother in Germany, his wife, and their son, Zabor. I painted our first grandchild, from my husband’s son and daughter-in-law, whom I was meant to meet for the first time this spring as well. I painted my best friends, whom I wished I could hug but would only see during our Zoom “happy hours.”
I painted my daughter’s teacher, Rinda, who was especially helpful during the early pandemic days. Rinda spoke to my daughter by phone after I told her she could not go back to school and reassured Erin that staying home was the right thing to do. She brought everything Erin needed from school and left it on our porch. I painted my friends who delivered groceries and were there to help whenever we needed anything.
I started sharing the portraits on social media, and family and friends enjoyed seeing their faces pop up. Some friends asked if they could buy their portrait. I also received a couple of painting commissions—including one for a grandparent who had passed away. This inspired me to turn my personal process into a project with a goal. It was a chance to keep connecting people and to help the arts at the same time. Instead of filling my guest room with visitors, I’m slowly filling the wall in that room with everyone’s faces. The goal is to finish up to a hundred portrait sketches of friends, family, and neighbors by spring of next year—and then to hold a fundraiser at Liberal Art Gallery in Roxbury, NY, where everyone can come and pick up their portrait in return for a donation to a local visual or performing arts organization, such as the Roxbury Arts Group, The Open Eye Theater, and local school arts programs. The arts are suffering incredibly during this pandemic, and I feel this is a fitting way to give back to the community. ▪