Sigh

There are pictures comparing side-by-side how cities looked a few weeks ago, to how they look now that life is paused. All is quiet, clear, beautiful. (Beautiful because I know that the smog was also choking, poisoning, and decaying the life that thrived there. If I didn’t know this, maybe the smoky images would seem more beautiful.)

Mother Earth must be breathing a deep sigh, the attack against her ecosystems and abundant lifeforms and landforms has lost its aggressive edge. Sigh, Planet, sigh.

We are all taking a break from the roads, from the rushing, the gaining, the buying, the striving. Are we using less, throwing away less, wasting less food, buying less crap, thinking less useless thoughts about stupid things (to focus on painful thoughts about illness and loss)?

Sigh is also for how I felt when on our neighborhood walk today, we encountered a “No Admittance” sign half-way to the horse-track and barns, owned by Cornell, where we like to visit the sheep and horses and geese and run around a huge old horse racetrack (unused it seems) overlooking distant hills, next to peaceful forest. It’s an other-worldly spot, I can’t put my finger on why. Maybe because there is no sight or sound of a car or anything “modern”, just fields, quiet horses in a pasture, open sky. The sky always looks very tall and slanty from the track, like I can see the motion of this planet spinning by it.

So, the sign told us that the property manager of this “Equine Park” (didn’t know that’s what it was called) had closed it to unauthorized personnel due to Coronavirus, but that we could walk around the park on trails. We turned left instead of going straight, walking along the edge of the dried up remains of the cornfields, woods on our right. When I read that sign I thought I’d lost my sanctuary from the lonely isolation, but turns out the woods are even better. They are also quiet, with some trails but no one was there. The trees are very far apart, the terrain is mellow, like scenes from the Princess Bride (the end part, not the Fireswamp). I imagined dousing my kids with essential oil and permethrin tick spray and sending them out to play there all summer. They can build forts and get lost, but come out to familiar fields on any side. And no one will kidnap them because they might have the Coronavirus. (Just kidding, potential kidnappers, I will go with them and carry a wooden sword, like we did today, to fight the virus, or any neighbors who might try to get too close.)