Poetry, Nature, Essay

For an Instant we Saw it

Pandemic memories of quieter times

Do you remember the vacuous skies, devoid of airplanes, but filled with birdsong?

And the monkeys jumping off of balconies into hotel pools while penguins waddled through the streets of Cape Town?

And the blue, oh that blue.

I’ve not seen quite that hue since I was a child running through the fields above Lake Canandaigua, amidst the Queen Anne’s Lace, on what seemed like an eternal summer day.

We’ve swayed the balance, we humans, in a dance in which we thought we’d taken the lead.

But we didn't heed the frogs, who tried to tell us that the waters had become toxic, or the sparrows, whose sweet songs had dwindled into a four-part melody with just one singer whose tawny breast was heaving with sorrow from atop the last tree standing in what used to be an ancient forest, now reduced to stumpy fields.

For an instant, we saw it.

Elephants in the streets, rhinos in the square, javelinas dashing down the alleys of Tucson, Arizona, and the air, oh the air.

You could glimpse the Himalayans all the way from Rajasthan, and imagine what it felt like to live in awe of that towering abode of the gods.

And the quiet. A blanket of hushed silence descended upon us, and for a few precious months the irrelevant chatter of the world dissipated.

For an instant we saw it.

It raised an awareness.

We had forgotten, or had maybe never seen it — the forests as our temples, the oceans as our holy waters, the innate knowledge that we are but the sons and daughters of the Earth.

For an instant we saw it.

Can we close our eyes, then blink and remember the vision with the burning need to see the beauty of it again?

For a few precious months all of the creatures of the earth caught a fleeting glimpse of what the world could look like if we, humans, stopped meddling so much with Mother Nature.

Amidst the uncertainty and the trauma of the pandemic, the wild world held us in her embrace, revealing both her power and the vastness of her grandeur. I remember walking the trails in the hills near my home, in utter awe of the birdsong uninterrupted by the rumble of airplanes. And the sky — truly I don’t remember skies that clear since I was a child in Upstate New York fifty years ago.

It never occurred to me when I was a kid that we might one day live in a world without elephants or rhinos or lions. The young me watched Born Free and, in my mind, I was running through the golden fields of African grasses with Elsa the lion. I knew that someday I would get to see the wonders of that magical world where those wild creatures roamed free in their natural environment.

I did get to South Africa, a few years ago, and I was awed by the raw power of that land, but I was also so saddened to know that I was seeing some of the last rhinos on the planet. How could this have happened? How did we let this happen?

How are we not protecting the elephants, creatures who love and mourn and are just striving to live their lives, from being hunted down for their tusks?

How are we allowing our skies to become so filled with choking particulate matter that we cannot understand what blue really means?

For an instant we saw it. We caught a glimpse. We were reminded that the forest is our temple, the oceans our holy waters.

Nature’s power courses through our veins, her beauty through our souls. She holds us in a tight embrace and loves us even though we forgot.

It’s time we woke up and remembered.

Thank you for reading. You might also enjoy this poem, which I wrote in May of 2020:

Or this one, about the quiet which had descended in April 2020:

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem, or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

Photos, poem and story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.