Connecting with nature in isolation
By Dan Ryan for Ethos magazine: issue 12| April 2020
Every time I’ve run on the beach or walked in a wood lately I’ve felt a cold wave of anxiety that it could be the last. And maybe the last for quite some time…
Probably like many of you, I’m now predominantly working from home. It should be completely at home, but I live in a small house with my partner and a very noisy not-quite two-year old who have both also been evicted from work and nursery. As my work-life changed profoundly overnight, so too has my social-life. Glastonbury is gone, all lectures I was due to give cancelled, every event that I’d bought tickets for postponed, and every child’s birthday party removed from the calendar. Summer 2020 looks an absolute wipe-out, everything obliterated in a flash. The loss of my social connections may prove to be costly, but more concerning me is my personal (dis)connection from the rest of nature.
I am a textbook introvert. I do enjoy the company of others, and can sometimes even be good at it, but I always find it intensely draining. Because of the drain I’ve discovered I need quite specific respite and recovery, usually in the shape of a walk in a quiet wood or lonely beach. If no suitable woodland is available then a darkened room will do… As my calendar implodes and my social life collapses I suppose I pretend to be disappointed, but secretly I’m relishing the thought of some time off. All the things I can do! The garden, the decorating, the writing! I longed to self-isolate before it was cool.
How to keep connected with nature when isolating?
Spring is exploding around me making this is a difficult time to contemplate reducing my time outside. I have a weekly routine of checking camera traps in a local valley every Sunday. How will I know if I’ve found an otter if I can’t leave the house? Woodpeckers are hammering on trees outside our bedroom, three rook’s nests are being scrappily — and NOISILY — built in a neighbour’s ash, primroses smother every bank and hedgerow, and the bird song, wow, the bird song. Perhaps the quiet, and disquiet, on the streets is amplifying their melodies in my mind, but I’ve never heard an orchestra like this before. Waving and crashing crescendos of blackbird, robin, blackcap, and wren, filling the otherwise empty air waves. In a few weeks, about the time this issue of Ethos releases, the bluebells will be carpeting woodlands and swallows dancing in the sky again. It should be bliss. Should.
I’ve been wondering how I’d cope if I come to be stuck in the house, living my life in endless Zoom meetings, with a snotty toddler wrapped round my legs. How would I maintain and grow my relationship with nature and keep myself sane? My new workspace is an important if unconventional part of the answer. I’ve aimed my chair at the garden so I can see the succession of spring flowers and next to my laptop on my dining-table desk is a pair of binoculars to keep watch on the garden birds. I was delighted to discover I wasn’t the only one to have this idea. Chris Packham did too and he’s even set up a Twitter group, the Self Isolating Bird Club (@SIBirdClub), so people stuck at home can commune around the birds that visit them. I’m unreasonably excited to get to know more of the wildlife that calls my garden home.
The world we knew has changed forever. Spring is usually so optimistic and yet the times we’re in feel so dark. Assuming I stay healthy, over the next few months of challenge I am convinced it will be my consistent relationship with nature that keeps me going. What about you?
Dan Ryan is an eco-optimist. He’s an educator at the Eden Project in Cornwall, where he teaches university students, facilitates workshops for businesses and is part of the team creating new Edens around the world.
