Among the Green
I walked through the bushes and trees. Along beside the rice paddies. I walked among the green.
A once daily scene from a different past, an old friend.
Four months after the virus began disrupting, then ravaging humanity’s routine, my first glimpse of freedom proper. Four months mostly confined to my condo. A sense of normal returned, then snapped away by the latest scare, as living, breathing nodes spread out below across the streets of Bangkok. Streets that had been quieted by the absence of human and mechanical traffic. Where I’d stood gazing out across the rooftops — across the vast emptiness.
Now back in rural, Northern Thailand, I stood listening to those sounds again. To the stillness and calm.
The gentle swaying of grass-like leaves, the soothing ripple of a nearby stream, the busy songs of birds and insects.
The sun burned through the clouds and warmed my bare face where a mask would normally sit. The heat enveloped me.
Distant, verdant hills rose jaggedly, then rolled towards the horizon; interrupted only by an occasional bird gliding by. Burning season now long since over, I breathed in the clear air, the scents of freshness. The thick fog from our human endeavours to ever expand, consume and destroy washed away by the rains.
A local Thai woman puzzled at why I was taking photos of rice paddies. To her, they’re just an ordinary, everyday sight. Something laboriously farmed, then eaten. A basic necessity.
But what is beauty? Part inherited, part conditioned?
Perhaps it’s always all around us, even in a fleeting moment, a brief touch, a faint whisper. We just need to stop, look up and notice it. To be allowed the perspective to see and hear it. The chance to escape.
I escaped among the green again. My footprints now also erased by the rain. By the winds blowing across the rice paddies, through the trees, up over the hills and mountains, and away.
What will humanity learn from these experiences? Sudden events that have jolted us from the routine and forced us to reflect on our hopelessly destructive ways. Will we learn to see the beauty? To create communities, not divides, and to protect the wild from ourselves — and ourselves from the wild?
Tomorrow, I’ll return rejuvenated to the noisy, dusty, concrete streets and towers that have become my home. To my ordinary.
But that ordinary is punctuated by graceful trees scattered among the mass of chaotic grey. A glimpse of our lifeblood. Where green leaves still flutter in the wind too if you care to look up and notice.
