hope – Sue Belfrage

This morning, the heat was already shimmering in the fields and now it is too hot to think. I have finished a project and am weary to the bone after a broken night’s sleep. Yet I feel I ought to keep on going: I am lucky to have work, I am fortunate that I can easily work from home. But right now, I simply crave the sea and that sense of stillness carried on the breeze at the shore.

All around Britain, people are flocking to the beaches, and who can blame them? If you and your family have spent most of this year locked in by an invisible disease, wouldn’t you be keen to escape outdoors too? However, I probably won’t be joining them just yet. Not until the crowds lessen.

Much at the moment seems to be a question of balance: of the numbers of deaths, loss and potentially life-changing aftereffects from this terrible new virus offset against those suffering because of cancelled medical appointments and delayed treatments; of livelihoods gone and the futures of the young put in jeopardy; of oceans polluted by waves of PPE; of the price of loneliness set against the risk of infection.

To find our way in this altered world, many of us seem to be adopting a form of doublethink, holding others accountable for breaking the ever-changing rules while protecting ourselves with justifications for doing the same. The challenge is to remain self-aware; in retrospect, I think I can see where I’ve projected anger and frustration onto those who didn’t altogether deserve it.

This isn’t going to be easy – tiptoeing our way into an unstable future; finding the balance and how to live in the world. While 2020 is turning out to be a year of plague, fire and flood of biblical proportions, nature itself is neither inherently good nor bad; it just is. It doesn’t sit in moral judgement of us. If Nature is a goddess, she is indifferent to prayers and responsive to actions. After all, why should she be any more moved by our petitions than the clicking of a beetle, or the roar of a lion? However, we humans do need to be morally accountable, both to this planet we inhabit and to each other.

At least I know that the sea and the breeze will still be waiting.

I’m used to silence – it’s virtually part of my job description – but even I have been struck by the quiet that has settled over the village where I live. No trains, no planes, little traffic; just the occasional boy racer flooring it and annoying the neighbours as he returns to a house-share up the lane.

It feels strange not to connect in person with the people I love and like, to keep my distance – as if we are all caught up in a weird social experiment. Which, in a way, we are… because of a virus that is casting a fearful shadow over human beings around the world.

In these days of social distancing, family, friends and colleagues have been in touch more often than usual – reaching out over the phone and on screen. Through modern technology and fibre optics, the voice creates a bridge from the heart. In the midst of so much fear, disease and devastation, many of us, myself included, are rediscovering the power of connection, speaking and listening to each other again instead of texting or typing.

So here is my voice to you, in a slightly tinny recording, reading a poem by a writer who was used to solitude and to keeping her own company, and who wrote when she didn’t necessarily expect anyone to read her words: ‘Hope is a Feathered Thing’ by Emily Dickinson.

Sue Belfrage

writer, editor, artist and illustrator

Tag: hope

A Delicate Balance