Space to Breath in a Pandemic

Suddenly, unexpectedly we find ourselves in stillness, existing in small spaces, unable to connect, touch, or move at will to the places we want to go.

My normal life is rarely consistent: I have no routine, no permanent home, and no day of work is the same as the last. The closest I came to a sense of stability in recent years was when I lived on a narrowboat along the London canals. But even then, every fortnight for five years, I moved my floating corridor to a different towpath home. For all the comforting gentle rock of water that incased me, I never felt the grounding force of earth beneath my feet. 

Now all plans have collapsed, travels postponed, work cancelled, and an uncertainty over what the future holds grows every day. Yet in the midst of a crisis, there is a tranquility that I haven’t experienced, and perhaps have secretly craved, for as long as I can remember.

Boating in Spring

© Becca Spooner

In the stillness I have witnessed the arrival of spring on the land I was born in, watched the trees unfurling into bloom, heard the birds of my native home sing above the silent streets, and observed the rise and fall of the moon through crisp evening skies. Every day I experience an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the million fortunes that have been gifted to me, and above all that of the abundant nature I’m surrounded by.

At the start of the pandemic I was visiting my dad in hospital every day for an unrelated condition, with the growing panic of Covid-19 consuming us. One day a man in the bed next to my father lay dying, and as I left the hospital the world came crashing down; I was totally overwhelmed.

In a state verging on hysteria I craved something strong to calm me down, nothing like a smoke to remind us to let out a deep, stagnant breath. But in the end I sat in the garden and stared at a leaf uncurling in the spring sunshine. As I watched the beautiful little leaf, I felt the calming grace that nature commands, the sigh of air from my grieving lungs, and the weight of sadness shed from my soul.

Sitting amidst the concrete London jungle, surrounded by city and grey and fear, all it took was one leaf to reconnect me to this earth, to this moment, to the only consistency of this life: to the breath.

A snail-like stalk in the Amazon rainforest

© Becca Spooner

One sleepless night, a few days into lockdown, I remember a conversation with a 12-year old Nepalese girl who had witnessed the 2015 Earthquake that killed 9000 people and left three million homeless. The quake struck with such force that Mount Everest trembled, and for a moment in time the highest point on this earth lost its footing. She recalled how her family had camped out in the streets for weeks as aftershocks escalated the damage and fear, the survivors too terrified to return home.

I can’t imagine what it feels like to have that grounding force we take for granted shift beneath my feet. In the UK, most of us live in blissful detachment from major environmental disasters, and so far we have seemingly escaped the dramatic calls of climate instability. But the world is different now in a way it never has been before. We wake up and feel a pang of emotion that resonates like grief: a sinking feeling that has no bottom. This virus has exposed many cracks along the fragile foundations on which we have built our societies.

A lonesome Yak in Nepal’s Himalayas.

© Becca Spooner

During the seven years I worked with indigenous people in South America and Southern Africa, there was never a doubt amongst these diverse peoples of the planet’s gifts. As semi-nomadic peoples they had few possessions, no fixed abode, or regular “work” to speak of, but they all shared a passionate reverence for the land they called their home. For tribal people there is no question about the importance of sustaining our Earth: without it, they cannot hunt, gather their food, build their homes, practice their rituals, speak to their Gods, or make their medicines. And are their needs really so different to our own?

We are made up solely of particles afforded to us by this planet, and yet, just as we disregard the sacrifices of our parental mother, we spend the majority of our short lives ignoring the marvel of this unique environment that gives us life. Without oxygen blown to the winds by trees rooted in her soil, nutrients that multiply like magic in the darkness of her compost, water that flows through ravines like veins across her vast surface, we would be but dust on the surface of a lifeless rock. 

An Arhuaco girls peeps out from her home in Colombia’s Sierra Nevada mountains

© Becca Spooner

We have brought to life a tragedy where it’s normal to wear masks, not to protect us from viruses, but to stop us choking from the deadly fumes we exhale to transport us around the globe; we drink water from throwaway plastic bottles even if we have the privilege to take it safely from the tap; millions of tonnes of food, much of it wrapped in plastic, is discarded into landfill because we are too full, too lazy or too disorganised to make it last.

Now, as the Earth suffocates under the weight of our demands, we too are gasping for breath.

The aftershocks of a pandemic will not be experienced by everyone the same, and we cannot ignore the disparity of resources shared amongst the people on our soil, let alone the rest of the planet. Some of us are fortunate: we have homes that are safe to retreat to, where we can wait for the dust of a virus to settle. For the briefest of moments we can breath in air that is clean, and watch nature burst forth through the concrete cracks with the energy of spring.

So for those of us who still can, let us find gratitude in the simplest of acts, the greatest of privileges, and the only true stability we have in life: breath in, breath out, breath in…