Rewilding Our Minds

ALMOST EXACTLY A YEAR AFTER England locked down for the first time, as the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, I was walking down a wild and overgrown abandoned canal with my young family, looking for frogspawn and other signs of spring. I was 10 days overdue with our third child, deliriously desperate to go into labor, and seeking signs and talismans everywhere. When we found the lumpy soup of proto-frogs, it felt reassuring to me: a symbol of renewal, the circle of life, the planet turning on its axis. I wouldn’t be pregnant forever.

We walked on and watched wrens, small and curved as eggs, glide across the path, which was bordered by strongly scented, vivid green wild garlic and freshly unwrapped nettles. We had planned to give our new son the middle name Wren, and I read into the birds another sign he might be on his way, finally. I counted three wrens and thought, well, perhaps it would be three more days. (I am not usually superstitious.)

That morning, I had read online about an observation that women were remaining pregnant longer during the pandemic. The theory was that we were holding our babies inside because of anxiety about safe delivery and the hazardous and uncertain state of the world. I was certainly nervous, and our daily walks were an attempt at loosening some of the tension. At the canal, my four-year-old daughter threw sticks at the hazel catkins suspended strobe-like over the still water and fallen oak trunks, to conjure clouds of golden pollen, which exploded like a wizard’s puff of smoke. We saw the first butterfly of the year—a lemon-yellow brimstone—and heard the tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker. The world was surging forward as the sun returned. The counterpoint of early spring soothed my anxious mind, and instead of worrying about the news, I thought what a magnificent world the baby would be born into.

I had become more adept at finding meaning in the natural world through daily practice over a year of quarantines and lockdowns. In England, for a period of time, we were allowed just one hour outdoors a day. My family and I slurped up as much life as we could find, searching greedily for color and shapes and forms and textures and variety in the local urban cemetery next to our house and in the woods nearby.

It seemed lots of folk were doing the same: leaning on the rest of the