We are publishing submissions about the COVID-19 crisis from readers daily on NewPhilosopher.com in the hope that it can help us all make sense of what is happening, and as a historical record of how it made us feel. Here are your thoughts, from around the world.
By Josh Markey, Melbourne, Australia
These autumn afternoons, as I step out into the dappled sunlight warming the couch on the back patio, I stand quietly and just... listen. I hear the Rainbow Lorikeets in the huge gum tree that branches over my neighbour’s backyard. I hear the laughter of children nearby. I hear the wind in the tall row of Lillypipies standing along the line of my fence. As it grinds to a halt, the low, all-consuming rumble of the Great Machine has nearly faded completely. Soon enough, should I stand in this spot, it will be as if there is no longer a world beyond these fences and tree canopies that surround me at all.
In these moments I feel a deep sense of peace wash over me. I inhale a lung full of air and imagine that it already seems cleaner on its way in. I am part of a great sigh of relief emanating from the Earth. In a few short weeks the planet itself has done what waves of well-intentioned and without doubt courageous environmentalists have failed to do in decades of blood, sweat and tears. The Earth has brought the savage machinery of human civilisation to a halt. It is as if She has risen up to save us, and all this time we thought She was in need of rescuing.
Anyone who loves this planet, marvel at her truth-telling power! The Earth is holding up a mirror to her wayward custodians in a way that only nature is capable of. I read with a chuckle that the Honourable Peter Dutton not only found his personal borders had been penetrated by a ‘foreign invader’ that managed to get inside his body without his knowledge, but as if to add insult to this injury, he also found himself unceremoniously cast within the same frame as the foreign-bringer-of-strife that he has made a career out of vilifying, by potentially infecting the ‘First family’ of the United States. He promptly vanished from public view.
