Heroes Not Zombies

I love the places where one element meets another. The places where constant change is right in front of my eyes.

These are borderline places, zones of transition and transformation. There’s a word for spaces and regions like these – liminal spaces.

This first photo today is of one such area. You can see its coastal and that the tide is out revealing rocks, plants, seaweed, and rock pools. I love the colours in this photo and how you just know that, despite this being a single, still, image, it is already changing and won’t look exactly like this in a few moments time. I see some ships in the distance too and wonder about the people onboard, making a journey, transitioning from one place to another, from one life perhaps to another.

Here’s my second photo

Staying at the coast for this one….an image which is almost entirely composed of shades of blue. You just know that this apparently blue sand is wet, and that as it dries it will turn golden. There are no hard edges in this photo. Just gentle curving lines where the sea turns to surf, and the water bubbles up with escaping air. This is a calming image to me. I see it and I can hear the rhythm of the waves breaking on the shore. I can smell the fresh, invigorating sea air (and hope it won’t be TOO long before I’m allowed out to experience it again).

Number three…

Take in Scotland one winter this one shows either the spreading ice on top of the loch, or maybe it was receding….who knows? I can’t remember. But again you can almost see this changing before your eyes. There are edges here which are highly reminiscent of the ones in the second image….of the sea breaking on the shore. Although this time it is ice breaking on the water, or water eroding ice. The bonus in this image is the reflection. You can see the trees on the slope of the hill, but they are much darker on the surface of the water, which seems kind of dream like to me. A glimpse into the Earth’s unconscious.

Finally…..

The low morning mists at the foot of Ben Led seem to mimic the shape of the hills above them. The mist rises and falls the way the land rises and falls. There is clear ground between me and the misty zone, and clear ground rising above it, creating a very special kind of mysterious liminal space I think. Beautiful.

Here we all are. In the midst of this pandemic. Nothing is the same. Everything has changed and, often frighteningly, continues to change so quickly we can’t even see what’s coming. But this pandemic will end. And what then? What kind of world will we live in together after this? Sure, there will be forces which try to get right back on exactly the same track as we were on before, but something else seems to be emerging in this liminal space….a re-evaluation of what’s important in life, of relationships, of the kind of work different people do, of how we are so inter-dependent, so connected. Of how we share this one single planet on which Life exists without borders.

Let’s use this space, this region, this zone, to reflect and to think. After all, many of us the time to do so now. Let’s use this time to imagine how we humans might better live on planet Earth. Together.

What do you hope will be different afterwards?

What do you imagine the post-pandemic world might look like?

How might health care change? How might work change? How might education change? How might economics and politics change? [add your own question here…..because everything might change]