Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

I get up this morning, as I do every morning.

I wake up, sort of gray light coming through the closed curtains, and I think, all right,

here we go again.

I sit up on the bed. I look out, I pull up the curtain, I look out the window, and I think, all right, here we go again. I sit up on the bed. I look out, I pull up the curtain,

I look at the window, and I think, how many days of, like, plague have we lived through now?

What exactly are we going to do today that is pretty much the way we've been running our

lives since everything changed so long ago.

Like a year ago last March, I was talking to some friends in South Africa today.

And it's the same thing.

Like we just keep on, keeping on.

Will we ever see each other again?

We don't know in the flesh.

We don't know.

We certainly hope so.

But nothing feels certain. And the conditions under We don't know. We certainly hope so, but nothing feels certain and the conditions

under which we're living are tiring people out, like all over the globe. People still run this risk

of getting sick, but it's so wearisome to keep guarding against it that people are getting something that I've heard called

COVID fatigue. And it's not just COVID, you guys. It's also just the everydayness of a human

life can get very, very daunting. It's the everydayness sometimes that gets to you. I love that that meme that I've

seen several places online that says that courage doesn't always roar. Sometimes it's the quiet voice

...