Geez, the weather has been weird today. Pea soup fog since the early morning, sometimes so thick that I can barely see the street from my window, and it can’t be more than 150 yards away. I could really use some sunshine to lift my spirits a bit. The news reports of business closures has me on edge especially given that our little town exists primarily on the tourist trade. All our restaurants are closed except for take-out and all bars, breweries and other watering holes are also shuttered. This will badly impact our neighbors, who own and operate the 1916 Bar in Seguin inside the old Aumont building. I have a horrible feeling that this is going to get a whole lot worse before we begin to see anything like an end to it all. So many, many people are out of work and will soon be suffering greatly. COVID-19 is just the tip of the iceberg – the resulting economic havoc will take years to put to rights and some towns may never fully recover. I hope ours is a bit more resilient but I pray that everyone, in every city and town across the US, may be able to get through this.

I did some more drawing today. Not much really, just some doodling, mainly filling in a mandala that I’ve been working on since I came back to the hospital, but I also began exploring character development on an idea that popped into my head early this morning while I was lying in bed trying to go back to sleep. Yep, the brain won. While I was noodling away at the mandala this afternoon, one of the hospital chaplains came in and we ended up having a really nice chat. I guess one of the comments I made about mandala creation being a meditative experience made him ask if I was Buddhist. Well, no, I’m not Buddhist, I still consider myself Christian, but I do have some leanings in that direction and told him so, and that I’d seen the Dalai Llama speak once and Thich Nhat Han twice. At the mention of the latter’s name, he brightened up and told me that he absolutely loved much of what the old Zen Master had to say, and that his simple teachings were applicable no matter which faith a person followed. This was surprising to me. Here I thought most, if not all, of the religious leaders here in Texas would be Bible-thumping fire-and-brimstone zealots and here was this quiet little man, chatting amiably and enthusiastically about the writings of a person of a far different faith. Bit of an eye-opener there!

Not much more to report. I really should have taken a walk this afternoon – it might have improved my mood a bit, but I ended up watching two films instead. I’ve slowly been working through the Marvel Universe films in roughly the order they were released and I also watched Disney/Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur” for the first time. It certainly wasn’t up to the old pre-Disney Pixar story-writing standards, not by a long shot, but it was still very cute, and not a bad way to end the day.😊