Fellow creatures

Reflections from a home front: 8
Our reaction to the lockdown, as briefly observed last time, might depend on whether we are meerkats or sloths at heart.  For one effect of living in this unfamiliar and uncertain territory is the way it tends to bring personal character traits to the surface. Sociability is just one dimension, though. There’s also our adaptability, our ability to cope with crisis or uncertainty, our reaction to being told what to do – or to no longer  being told what to do. 

Not only do the strictures reveal our traits, they seem also to intensify them. To continue with the bestiary, whilst I’m really quite a happy puffin, pottering about the burrow and making occasional forays along the local coastline, I am, it turns out, sharing my space with a wandering albatross that’s flapping about with increasing agitation.

Character traits also play out against the particulars of our situation. (With the prevailing conditions again tending to push things to the extremes; work is all or nothing, we are with family 24/7 or never. )  So, for example, and to return to the social aspect, a sloth in glorious isolation will hang happy, but a sloth forced to share the branch with other sloths, or – worse – a family of displaced and discombobulated meerkats – might be pretty stressed. 

With these amplified differences in character and situation, it could feel as if our social distance is becoming a psychological one. But, at the same time and with equal efficiency, the situation reveals our common humanity in all its interconnectedness. BC, it was sort of possible to carry on under the illusion that we could pursue our own individual path, doing our own thing in our own time. Now, it couldn’t be clearer: we’re all in it together. The truth is that we were always in it together. However much we may feel like different species at times, we’re all on the same planet.

I have to admit that my poem today isn’t a new one. (Well that’s a slippery slope, said the Wandering Albatross.) I’ve got a new one started but it hasn’t quite fallen into place yet.  However, I’ve been tidying my old poem collection and, in the course of rounding them up from various corners of the computer into one neat folder, I found this one. It was written for quite another sort of occasion, but, there’s something there about difference which seems to resonate. So I thought I’d dust it off and give it an airing while the other one sorts itself out. And here end the animal analogies. For now, at least.

      You are to me …
       ​so often an owl –
       an elegant soul,
       sharp eyed,
       night flyer –
       to wit,
       a hoot.

       And sometimes a sanglier* – 
       certainly singular,
       a secretive creature
       from deep in the forest – 
       no hiding 
       those tusks.

       But also a puffin –
       summertime clown,
       dapper flapper,
       tide catcher,
       on the edge,
       in the moment.

       A sea otter’s you, too, 
       happy afloat,
       at home on the deep,
       and in sleep,
       holding hands,
       so we don’t drift off.

       ​Would I weren’t a hedgehog –
       hugging the ground,
       a pricklish kind,
       ​too easily flattened, 
       but on clear nights now, 
       looking up at an owl.

       * Wild boar, Cingularis porcus

Read the introduction to the reflections