My “Circumference of Home” in 2008
Twelve years ago I took a vow to live car-free for a full year, and to stay inside a circle I drew on the map, with my Whidbey Island home at its center. It was a life changing experience that led to my book The Circumference of Home.
At the time, I undertook this journey out of my growing anguish over our mounting climate crisis, and my desire to close the gap between how I was living, and the crisis that was bearing down on us. But the impact of that year on my life, as I moved into it, was much more physical and spiritual than political. I fell back in love with the geography of Home I had grown up with, and somewhere along the line grown apart from. I traveled mostly on foot or by bicycle, and that extended act of slowing down moved me deeply. It turned into a powerful experience of homecoming unlike any I had experienced before.
My nervous system settled down in a deeply visceral way during that year, and I am noticing something similar now, as an impact of prolonged sheltering in place during the Covid 19 pandemic. My car-free year of local living was voluntary, while this period of extended self quarantine is not. And this time there isn’t a definite time limit on it, when “things will return to normal.” But the felt sense of homecoming is surprisingly familiar.
As we all wander deeper into the strange new landscape of pandemic, and as it becomes clear that we are in this to stay for awhile, I am noticing a softening in myself, a letting go of trying to control what I cannot control. And I am sensing the same potential for freedom in that. Once again, I find myself dialing back on my obsessive attention to the daily news cycles, and dialing up my awareness of what is unfolding right in front of me. Unlike the climate crisis, which in its relative abstraction has made it so much harder to mobilize around, I feel a comforting solidarity with a human world that is much less in denial, and therefore facing into this pandemic as the global crisis that it truly is.
As I have had to reluctantly concede that we are in this grand dilemma for months rather than just weeks, it is coming home to me that the changes at hand - however unpredictable - are no longer going to be superficial changes. This pandemic is going to re-shape us, not merely inconvenience us. And I find my habitual fear of such changes turning more toward curiosity. The vulnerability is real. But I still get to choose my posture of mind and heart in the midst of these wild forces of change.
And I can’t help but notice that the natural world around me is carrying on remarkably well. Here in Puget Sound country, another spring morning is dawning, crystal clear and beautiful. The days are noticeably lengthening, and the migratory birds are arriving back at my feeder for their own homecoming. My rhododendrons are bursting into glorious bloom. And echoing my year in circumference, I am much more present to it than usual. As one dear friend put it, forgotten parts of myself are coming back to life.
The Columbian poet William Ospina has observed that, while history is littered with pandemics, this is the first time we have experienced a pandemic not as local, but as global. There is a profound new sense of common humanity and shared destiny in this one. We are in it together across all accustomed borders. And we are stitched together in a new way by that fact, and by that awareness. He writes: “This ultra-informed and ultra-globalized society is giving us that new experience of sharing the curiosity, fear and fragility of all humanity, it is making us behave as a species.”
Learning to behave as a species: I love that image, and it feels true. There is great solace in experiencing this crisis as one interconnected human family. And there is solace too in feeling the relief as our larger body - the earth - takes a healing in-breathe that is suddenly not so burdened with the weight of global carbon emissions. It is a great irony that we are doing exactly what we would have been doing already if we truly understood the threat to our collective survival posed by the climate crisis itself. My own circumference of home, and all circumferences of home around the planet, are breathing clearer air now, listening to a more robust natural soundscape, than many have experienced in their entire lifetime.
As we grope for solutions to the pandemic, it might be an excellent time to remember that the words “ecology” and “economy” both share the same root in the Greek word oikos, which means “house”. May the house we re-build coming out of this crisis be a house we can all live in. And not the human species alone, but all species. My prayer is that we find the courage to allow ourselves to be re-made by this new messenger, so that we can move into closer alignment with the truth of our actual dependence on each other as a human family. And may the healing that is being experienced by the earth during this time of unexpected Pause, also become the healing we seek for ourselves as well, more viscerally understood, so that the changes we now choose to embark upon may serve not only ourselves, but the entire community of life.