I received a newsletter from Real Food store in Exeter recently and this photo was shown above one of the articles. I loved it as a beautiful photograph but then realised that it was also a metaphor for the Covid 19 pandemic.
I saw it as the path we have been travelling these past months - climbing slowly towards some sort of resolution of the problem. Hemmed in by fencing on both sides and only one possible way to go there being no going back. Step by step we have made our way and an uphill sruggle it has been for so many of us but now maybe the end is in sight and I wonder what the view from the summit might be. Will there be more hills that we can't yet see for us to climb? Or will there be a vista of green meadows filled with wild flowers, a cool clear river flowing through it and with birdsong accompanying the sound of the clean fresh water as it flows gently towards the sea or might it be a distopian scene with many people homeless and jobless searching for food amongst the empty buildings, shops shuttered and signs flapping in the cold wind. With diggers and machinery, the green meadow reduced to a building site with banging and drillling, shouting and crashing as another road or high speed railway takes shape and yet more homes that the jobless will not be able to afford are built on what might have been countryside?
I really hope that we might have learned something important on our way to the top of this hill and perhaps it might be possible to fashion a new normal which takes account of the planet and its people, somewhere the community spirit we have seen these past months might be part of the solution not yet more building more money making and less care for the Earth, and its people and the future. That green meadow view is what is keeping me plodding onward and upward.
