How I Survived the Pandemic: Reading Dwellings by Linda Hogan
During the pandemic, time felt strange, but I didn't have much stillness. I was an essential worker, a restaurant manager. While many people stayed home, I went to work every day. The restaurant stayed open. People were scared. Rules changed constantly. I was tired and responsible for others. My body never really stopped moving.
When I came home, I carried work with me. The noise of the day. The decisions. The worry. Reading Linda Hogan’s Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World did not take that away. It did something else. It helped me understand a different way of being present.
Hogan writes about staying with the world, not escaping it. Her idea of stillness is not doing nothing. It is paying attention. As she writes, “attention is the practice of love.” That line stayed with me because it didn’t ask me to slow down in a way that felt unrealistic. It asked me to notice what was already there.
After long shifts, I began spending time in the garden. I didn’t go there to accomplish anything. I didn’t go to be productive. I went because the garden did not rush me. I watered. I pulled weeds. I stood there. Some days nothing happened.
At first, that felt like boredom. I wasn’t used to it. Boredom felt like wasting time. But over time, I realized boredom was doing something important. When I was bored, I stopped trying to control things. I stopped checking my phone. I started noticing small changes. The soil. The light. What grew slowly. What didn’t grow at all.
At work, I had to be needed all the time. People depended on me. Decisions mattered. Mistakes had consequences. In the garden, I was not needed. The plants did what they were going to do. Things lived or died. I showed up, and that was enough.
Reading Dwellings while living this way changed how I thought about survival. Hogan does not write about fixing the world or mastering it. She writes about staying. About being awake to what is in front of you. About knowing your limits and accepting them.
During the pandemic, limits were everywhere. Supplies ran out. People burned out. Plans changed overnight. In the garden, limits felt different. They felt honest. Growth took time. Rest mattered. Silence was not a problem to solve.
The poems I wrote during this time, later collected as Pandemia & Other Poems, emerged from this routine. Work. Home. Garden. Quiet. Writing did not come from inspiration or big ideas. It came from repetition. From doing the same things day after day and paying attention to what stayed.
In a time when everything felt rushed and fragile, Dwellings helped me claim slowness without guilt. It reminded me that survival is not only about pushing through. Sometimes it is about standing still when you can. About letting boredom teach you something. About staying with the world long enough to really see it.
That is how I got through it.