I am one of the lucky ones.

Out at first light this morning in the crisp autumn air I was surrounded by the sounds of the countryside coming awake. Birds were calling and muttering an swinging on the wires. Horses were calling out for breakfast and cows were lowing to calves. My three dogs were excitedly barking at being outside with their humans again. A morning like any other in a long line of mornings stretching back years.

I am one of the lucky ones.

I love my life of semi isolation. To be surrounded by the absence of human noise and clutter is how I choose to live my life most of the time. I love my friends and family but do not feel the need to constantly see them, touch them, talk face to face. I just need to know they are out there, living their full lives. Isolating is not a burden, it is what I was born for! Well as long as we can eat, the animals can eat, I can collect the mail, we can get a vet when we need one, go to the doctor, use the internet, have the power always available, talk to friends via phone, Facebook and Zoom and so on. I don’t want to be socially isolated but physical isolation is my general modus operandi.

I know that isn’t so for everyone, perhaps for the majority of people. It is certainly not the way many people can even think about living when everything about our modern world requires most people to live in cities and towns. Where most employment is where most people are and most people are when most employment is. For most people this time of “social distancing’ and lockdowns is difficult. Difficult physically and difficult emotionally. We are going to go through tough times. Tempers will fray, waistlines will expand, boredom and hopelessness will take hold. We are going to wonder if we can get through this to when times “return to normal”.

Well the good news is most of us will endure, make it through, I am just not sure we will be “returning to normal” but instead creating a new normal. This time of enforced slowing down for a lot of us (not our essential workers who will be in one of the most pressured times of their lives) where we can go “back to grazing”. A fallow time of regeneration. A time to think creatively about what we want our future to look like. What we can learn from this time that we want to keep.

I leave you with a quote from a magical book about the nature of love and longing. I am looking forward to the time our hearts look back and only remember the good of these times.

“..the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and [that] thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera