Read this lovely essay about swifts and their unique flight patterns. Towards the end of the essay, the author writes:
Swifts have, of late, become my fable of community, teaching us about how to make right decisions in the face of oncoming bad weather. They aren’t always cresting the atmospheric boundary layer at dizzying heights; most of the time they are living below it in thick and complicated air. That’s where they feed and mate and bathe and drink and are. But to find out about the important things that will affect their lives, they must go higher to survey the wider scene, and there communicate with others about the larger forces impinging on their realm.
That was a beautiful lesson learned from observing a bird. When we go for walks in the park nearby, I always think about the resilience of all things natural - the tiny insect I would die under my tread easily, as a community is far more resilient than human are. They were here well before us and will like be here long after we are gone. In that sense the pandemic could well be nature's pause button, to correct the many wrongs done by us to all things natural, allow the earth to catch a breath and recover some.
When we are back to "normal" will be when that breath will end. It would be comforting to think of the crisis we are living through in these terms, except that the way humans are experiencing it is very uneven. It is not like a bad season for fire-ants where they swathes of them die and untimely death - no winners or losers. That would be easy to see an natural calamity - such is not the case with the pandemic at all. Some of us are writing utterly tone-deaf essays about dress shoes while others are finding it hard to follow religious rituals for loved ones who died of covid.
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