Intimacy
Outer chaos, inner calmness, and healing
Master Glenn Tobey
Addressing your emotional response to the pandemic.
April 6, 2020
Today’s topic is about intimacy.
Intimacy is about the closeness. Knowing ourselves in a very personal individual way. With this virus going on, this global reaction to it, it brings out some of the dark part of all of us and the uncertainties. Some of you might recall 65 years ago, I was around, when a meteor hit the earth. It dramatically changed everything on the earth. Everything had to do something with that huge explosion. So, pandemics are like that meteor. Everybody is affected globally. We all are going to have to change.
Some of us hear that the businesses are shutting down. Social isolation is where we have to relocate. How is all this affecting us? What are we going to take it with us? That is the external reality.
I spent the first 10 years in my life in Brooklyn, New York. I remembered a lot of fights. I remembered concrete and fences. I remembered no stars. I don’t t remember any sunrises or any sunsets. But what I do remember was a grocer, a cigar store owner, and a cereal and bakery. The grocer. Every morning somehow, I slipped away my house. My folks never do this. But I got up very early. I slipped and walked on the concrete a couple of blocks away. The grocer is hauling out the boxes of vegetables and put out on the sidewalk. He would take out the onions. He would swift the floor on the sidewalk. He was presenting his best. He would swift yesterday and now get ready for today. He was such a very loving and kind man.
Across the street from him, a gentleman owned a cigar store. He’s 60 years old and he had smoked too many cigars, but he always kept the cigar boxes because he knew the elementary school about 3 blocks away that I went to would always need in first grade cigar boxes to store pencils. Then he did that for the first graders or second graders. So, the kids knew always going to him at the beginning of the school year to get these cigar boxes. Still had that smell. But he knew that he was thoughtful and considerate. Not the cigar, but the thoughtfulness and considerate matter.
Then I would walk over with the penny in my pocket to the cereal and bakery. At the front of the counter inside the store there was a barrel of cereal and bread. I always remembered to take the cereal and bread and put down the penny. I could remember the looks of the husband and the wife and their older daughter looking at me with such kind smiles. I did not know at that time the bread cost a dime. But they accepted my penny. They just loved me for what I could offer to them.
So, what I remembered the role models, not the stars, not the sunrise, not the fights I had. I remembered the grocer for putting out the best he was. I remembered the cigar store man being thoughtful and considerate of other people’s needs. I remembered the cereal and bakery people there for loving me, for being kind and accepting whatever I had offered for them.
These are the role models I had. I had other kinds of models, too in my first 10 years. So, with this meteor, this pandemic that’s hitting, what is it that you want to be? Now it’s the time of social distancing. To find out how you can come out of this? What kind of role model you are going to take from your life? When I come out of this, this is what I am going to bring. Whether I am taking out the onion, to be the best, or to be thoughtful and considerate, or I accept what people have to offer. This is the choice that the virus is offering to you.
Qigong Master Glenn Tobey
Master Glenn Tobey, M. Div., M. A. in Management, is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker in private practice in Duluth, Minnesota.
He has almost forty years of experience in the Human Service field and has worked in both urban and rural settings, and values the collaborative community-based model.
He has also taught at the college level, and conducted numerous SFQ workshops and trainings in various community settings. Glenn continues to teach and to share his knowledge and wisdom of Spring Forest Qigong which is at the center of both his professional focus and his personal passion.
Glenn is a member of the SFQ teaching team. He teaches Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, Instructor Certification, and other workshops.