Our Lockdown in Europe, coincided with the 2020 Spring Bird choruses. I had never heard birds singing and chirping like this before, their orchestras drowning out my podcasts when I walked through the forests which had started to enchant me. Even though I felt like a child again as my eyes opened to the beauty of birds, rivers, trees, yellow and blue beehives, crystal clear ponds, swishing streams, deer in the distance — even though all this was so close, and so new, yet I could not distinguish the sound of a crow from frog, so ignorant was I, so out of touch with nature.
The forest was less than 2 km away, from where I lived, and it seemed it had been waiting years for me enter into it with my eyes and ears open, and to slow down long enough to notice its enthralling, complex beauty that I was part of and not divorced from. Eventually I could spend time sitting on a log in a clearing and feel how a shaft of sunlight would hold me in the warmth, and for once I began to feel a joy within me and to my astonishment found myself seeing this joy in all things around me.
Soon afterwards I knew I was changing because when I went to another town, the first thing I noticed was not so much the buildings or the people, but the trees. I could hold them in my heart now and then silently send them greetings from all trees around Basel where I live. I felt like a little yellow DHL delivery van, and that I had become a “tree messenger” carry greetings from trees to trees.
Finally, the Earth could hear itself think, and the voice of its thought was birdsong”
In his book “Birdsong in a Time of Silence” Steven Lovatt says: “Right at the end of July 2020, it was reported that the sudden decline in human activity during the pandemic has been registered by seismologists as a wave of silence passing over the Earth, its course exactly following that of the virus. From China to Iran to Italy, vibrations from traffic, industry and construction work faded or, for a time, halted altogether; the crust of the planet ceased to judder with the noise that had been dinning, seemingly unstoppably, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Finally, the Earth could hear itself think, and the voice of its thought was birdsong”
I took his words to heart and began a series of embroidery using the text: “Finally, the Earth could hear itself think, and the voice of its thought was birdsong.” I seemed to want to embed it into my soul as I embroidered it on the back of a jacket, the inside lining of a coat, the back of a summer dress and boldly wrote the text on a large painting I started at that time.
Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician, and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle?
There was another antidote to marinating myself in the fear of dying alone and anxiety about my children who were living far away in other countries. It was an article I had read by Arundhati Roy in the Financial Times on the 3rd April 2020. “…. Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician, and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not, secretly, at least submitting to science?” He ends his article with words of hope; ….” Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it”
Illustration: Crayon on paper: https://www.instagram.com/botan_ix/