the first warm day.

I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts.

—Virginia Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall’

It feels strange to say it in the midst of a global pandemic, but this is the calmest and least anxious I’ve felt since I moved to London a year ago. The skies are silent: no traffic noise, no endless stifling hum of planes. A silent spring—but not at all as Rachel Carson imagined it. And the quietness makes space for other things: the sound of the wind and the sound of the rain; the chanting of birds, the movements of light. Echoing the flowers, my heart begins to open and bloom. There is space again for thought: the sort of thinking that is softly expansive, like clouds. And, like clouds, when these thoughts condense and spill over into something solid, they are nourishing and generative—rainlike.

The air is less fogged. I begin to breathe more easily. There is space for soft attention, for gentleness; for sleeping and for sharing and for dreaming kinds of living that might always feel like this.

Yesterday was the first warm day. We’re lucky, so lucky in this city, to live in a building that has its own little park. The three of us—T., little P., and I—went outside and spent some time with the trees and with the flowers.

I’ve always loved outside, even when it’s hard to go there (perhaps because it’s hard for me to go there: the conception of outside relies upon there being an inside). Once upon a time, I was always outside; I hated it. Now, my sadness & my illness often keeps me indoors; but nevertheless, outside is so important. There’s a feeling of unselfing, of dissolution and porousness, that I only get when I’m fully, sensorially enmeshed in the relationships of air and weather and light and everything living and dying and changing and becoming and opening-and-closing, symphonic. Now that outside is half-forbidden, it feels even more precious; and the silencing of (some of) the machinery of capital has somehow sharpened that sense of connection, of relationship, of immersion, sensitivity. There’s a sense of communion that’s holy, that’s ecstatic; that’s almost psychedelic. Everything is luminous, everything aglow. It feels like love, like falling in love.