Lessons from the Pandemic: Ten Touchstones on the Road to Recovery

ABOUT INVOCATION SPIRITUAL GUIDANCE

I'm Brian Bard, a Spiritual Guide, Director, and Coach with services in Minneapolis, St. Paul, the greater Twin Cities MN area, and online. I’m also a writer with a series of novels in the works, and am active on the InVocation blog exploring spirituality, social issues, and mythology.

I’ve facilitated workshops, classes, ceremonies, and retreats in many different settings: community organizing/activism, funerals, memorials, grief support groups, spiritual communities, schools, theater, and universities. And since 2020, I’ve had countless conversations with people about their experiences during the Pandemic Era, and what they’re hoping for from the Recovery Era. I’ve drawn from all these experiences to assemble these Lessons from the Pandemic, as well as upcoming, comprehensive courses on processing grief and finding your calling. I’m always available to for events speaking engagements, on these topics and more!

Beyond these, I offer guidance for individuals, couples, families, and groups of all beliefs, bodies, and backgrounds in a wide variety of spiritual matters. I accompany and coach clients as they connect with Spirit, Soul, and the Sacred, offering steady presence and fresh insight. Head to my website – invitedinvocation.com – to learn more about my services, my background and training, and a free consult.

I hope to keep working with you in some capacity, and to count you as a subscriber to the InVocation blog!

This is a free ebook, but if you feel inspired, you can send me a tip or support my work:

Every dollar you contribute enables me to offer

free and affordable spiritual guidance during a difficult time for our world.

Thank you for considering!

GRATITUDES

Welcome to this conversation on our Lessons from the Pandemic – thank you so much for being part of it! I sincerely hope you, your loved ones, and your community find this book helpful in the transition to the Recovery Era.

I want to thank those who made this guidebook possible: Ned Abenroth, Nicole Greenwald, Mary Kietzmann, Katie Kreitzer, Scott McRae, Kyle Petricek, Ellie Roscher, Paul Stoltenberg, Peter Watkins, Kirk Webb, Ellen Weber for their wise counsel; John & Leslie Williams for their gracious hospitality; Marsha Arndt & Rick Nelson, Jill & Chris Bishop, Nick Dailey-Arndt, Margot Dailey, Perrine Dailey, and the Illuman community for their love and support; Jordan Bishop for her brilliant filmography; and Devin Bard, as always, for everything.

I also want to acknowledge that I reside and work on the ancestral homelands of resilient indigenous peoples: the Dakota Sioux, Lakota Sioux, and Anishinaabe Ojibwe First Nations. I offer my gratitude to them for their historical and continued stewardship of this place, for their care and wisdom. And I offer my gratitude to the land itself for the gift of life, for its care and wisdom. Wherever we live, may all of us work for a future where our local Nations and their lands are thriving.

And, outside of just this book, may all of us also continue working to heal the world in the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic. May we live in ongoing solidarity alongside those with fewer resources, at home and abroad, so they too can begin moving toward recovery.

Brian Bard

InVocation Spiritual Guidance

Minneapolis, MN, USA

Copyright 2023 © Brian Bard

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise – without the prior written consent of the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. ISBN: 9798215041574

To access this free ebook, visit invitedinvocation.com or one of our publishing partners listed there.

The material in this ebook is for educational purposes and does not replace diagnosis or treatment by a qualified mental health professional. The author cannot guarantee any results expressed or implied herein, and cannot be liable for any outcomes pertaining to users of this ebook’s content.

Cover images credited under Works Cited

CONTENTS

LESSONS FROM THE PANDEMIC

Ten Touchstones on the Road to Recovery

About InVocation Spiritual Guidance, Gratitudes

Introduction: The Roadmap to Recovery

PART 1: CATHARSIS

The Need for Catharsis

Touchstone 1: Moving through Numbness and Silence with Storytelling

Touchstone 2: Moving through Doubt and Despair with Time in Nature

Touchstone 3: Moving through Anger and Conflictedness with Creative Projects

Touchstone 4: Moving through Sorrow and Sadness with Eulogizing

Touchstone 5: Moving into Gratitude, Hope, and Purpose with Intention-Setting

PART 2: SUPPORT STRUCTUES

The Need for Support Structures

Reorientation: Restoring a Sense of Time and Place

Touchstone 6: Finding Sacred Times

Reconnection: Restoring Relationships and Community

Touchstone 8: Returning to Radical Presence

Touchstone 9: Returning to Village Life

Touchstone 10: Centering the Margins

A Blessing

Works Cited, Further Reading

INTRODUCTION

The Roadmap to Recovery

These are big, daunting questions. But I’m convinced we need to be asking them right now, before the pandemic fades completely into the background of our experience.

In this book, I’ll first illuminate why holding these questions in focus is absolutely essential to our post-pandemic transition and growth going forward. Then I’ll share some concrete actions we can all take, as individuals and collectively, in our personal, professional, and social lives. These insights draw on many observations, conversations, and research I’ve been doing as part of InVocation Spiritual Guidance’s community pandemic recovery work.

Why is this important?

I expect for some folks at this stage, the third question above may stand out. For many of us, by the time we passed two years since the pandemic began, it had mostly ebbed from our awareness. Why is this conversation still important? Why should we care? Haven’t we had enough of pandemic-talk? The world keeps turning, life goes on – why shouldn’t we?

Out of everything we’ve endured in the Pandemic Era, I think passion – in a word – is what we’ve been most deprived of. That vitality, vivacity, vigor, and verve – that’s what we most need to reclaim. But it’s still eluding us.

The hardship of these past few years has worn a lot of us out. Maybe you’ve felt it. There’s a malaise and melancholy that still afflicts many of us, a slump and stupor, a sort of social hangover you can sense when you talk to people or show up in community spaces. Students, employees, and eventgoers are less engaged than they were before the pandemic. People are less active and energized in their relationships and their private lives. There’s less excitement and zest for life than before 2020. We’re more disoriented, distracted, and disconnected.¹,²,³,⁴

Even if you haven’t felt it palpably yourself, the data, as we’ll cover in this book, show it plain as day: We’re in a kind of collective long-COVID. And we need to shake out of it. We’re still living in a hazy grogginess, and we need to wake up.

We need to get back to the passion we once knew. We need to rebound and recover. And we may even have the chance to usher in a new era beyond the Pandemic Era – a Passionate Era. But unfortunately, we can’t teleport to that destination. We have a journey ahead of us.