Yesterday was reading articles about the lockdown and nature. About how people are noticing that the human quietness makes the sounds of nature, even the movement of wings come into the foreground. The birds can almost be too loud! Sitting here, in my garden this early morning, the diversity and depth and panorama of sound was delightful. Bees and other buzzing insects up on the bramble slope, the whirr of the wings of a passing sparrow, even the cars, because of their infrequency step forward into the mix. It was magical to sense the difference in the diversity of sound without the background of human noise, that we do not even hear, but causes other sounds to disappear.
Now, as I write, the Chinese restaurant’s air conditioning breaks the moment and restores the human dulling of nature’s sparkling soundscape.
This is not nature’s pandemic. It is actually a tiny tiny blip in the big field of nature. Only one species is affected and that only marginally so. It is deeply affecting that species’ hubris – it’s abstract architecture of commerce and mechanised movement and its ill-founded confidence in its mental supremacy. But the other 99.99% of nature just is, just continues to be itself, in and of itself and for itself. In fact, it can expand, retake sensuous domains that it has cowered from, due to the clumsy presence of the one species.
This pandemic is actually an outbreath, a sigh in the natural world. And for us too, if we can slip from our tense anxiety and breath with it, listen with it, see with it, feel with it.
Written 4th April 2020
Photo by Anastasiya Romanova on Unsplash
