sit time from mother earth
08 Oct 2022during covid we saw the air water and animals return. we should rmbr that it actually doesn’t take that long for natural systems to recover if we just let it happen
last week i was listening to a beautiful interview with corrina gould the for the wild podcast. she named a beautiful (new for me) lesson that has come from the pandemic.
early in the pandemic, i heard many lessons from many people. some from indigenous elders. some from folks like arundhati roy and naomi klein. some of them i was also coming to. the biggest lessons i remember were along the lines of “mother earth is telling our species to slow down.”
two years in, i feel like we missed the primary opportunity to roll with and integrate that lesson at scale. not only did some of us not slow down, some of us sped up! and this wasn’t exclusive to particular political stances. it seemed some like people of all stripes sped up. for different reasons, but the speed definitely increased for some folks. so if a global disease outbreak couldn’t slow us down (at least not for long), i really have begun to doubt anything really would.
that said, there were real shifts and some of us did slow down. planes flew less frequently, fewer cars were on the road, more walking and biking happened. many individuals and groups are integrating the learning and did slow down and aren’t going back.
but what gould said about another lesson covid is teaching/taught us feels right on:
…we need to listen to what COVID is telling us right now, their horrific disease that’s happening to us and but while we’ve been sitting in place. You know, I kind of feel like Mother Earth, kind of put us in a sit time as human beings to kind of learn something to look at what happened while we were sitting for a very short amount of time, was that the air plant cleared up that the water is started to become restored, that the animals that originally lived in territory in places where cities are now, came back. And so it’s important for us to look at what’s happening in the environment, and how we have had a huge impact on that as human beings. — corinna gould, timestamped link to quote
my takeaway: for the weeks and months we did slow down, globally, the earth’s capacity to return to wellness was on full display. it took a surprisingly small amount of time for nature to start bouncing back. for fish and sharks returned to places they hadn’t been in ages, large animals and predators showed up in places they hadn’t been in decades, etc.
the lesson: given space, it doesn’t take very long for (natural) ecosystems to return to their previous places of balance.
given that we didn’t seem to collectively learn the slow down lesson, i love the idea that this other lesson about the pace at which nature can restore herself is one that could help us mobilize in the future. it doesn’t take being slow for that long to allow mother nature to do her thing.
the question: will we ever use that lesson?
who knows. but it’s a good lesson to have and i know i personally am gonna try to find ways to bring it into larger and larger systems. and if folks like tricia hersey continue to have the impact she’s having, there’s real hope out there i think.
words / writing / post-processing
402w / 14min / 8min