For a few months this year, the natural world completely arrested our sense of time.

 A tiny virus crept into our lives, but with the power to bring global markets to their knees. Whole countries had to shift their priorities, required to temporarily re-assess the value of what was important. We were all slowed down, as if nature’s hand had reached out to steady the spin of the Earth and ask us some serious questions. 

 We might be gradually emerging from lockdown now, but the impact of coronavirus will have a lasting effect on so many people. For some, that effect is the tragic loss of loved ones. For others it might be struggling finances, or young children bewildered by the strange shift in the rules of the world around them. Re-entry to normality will not be easy. That story is still unfolding. 

This scale of nature’s interruption to normality is immeasurable. Everybody’s different stories and experiences should, and hopefully will, be recognised and told in years to come for their equal importance. But this unexpected interruption also brought with it a strange and welcome flourishing in the natural world. 

Air quality in cities drastically improved. Noise pollution was reduced. Cormorants returned to the calmed canals of Venice. Council green spaces lay unmown, bringing forth rainbows of wildflowers populated by the heady buzz of insects. Data charts show how global warming may have temporarily slowed, suggesting re-energised approaches to how governments can tackle climate change. The birds sang louder, and more hopefully. 

Alongside this shift, communities stepped out to support one another. Neighbours who’d never spoken did one another’s shopping. There was time to talk and reflect and share experiences and tales of lockdown survival. 

When the world seems suspended, gaps in time appear. Many chose to fill those gaps by seeking out connection – locally, online, by telephone or just over the fence. Others seized upon the once-a-day exercise in green space to commune with nature, recognising (unwittingly or not) the psychological benefits of being surrounded by a verdant spring taking hold.

Attending a live performance or listening to an audio drama demands a similar suspension of normality. We put to one side how life really is, and peer through the looking glass to imagine for a short while how it could be. In terms of the natural world, the theatre of deep lockdown was, in some ways, a remarkable moment: one that suspended normality for a short while. Some of the windows Hefted intended to open upon the world through the telling of stories, became reality.

Hefted was written in direct response to life in North Devon. It explores the delicate interplay between humans, nature, our experience of time, and our ideas about how things should – or could – change in the future to maintain a balance with the natural world. 

Coronavirus, the ensuing lockdown, and the temporary shift in human beings’ relationship with the environment has amplified that challenge of finding balance, reminding us that the conversation needs to keep taking place on a global scale. 

A running idea in Hefted is the voice of the land: the sheer scale of its power and legacy next to the short-lived time of human beings’ existence on the planet. Characters in the earlier stories make choices in deep recognition of that power – but as human progress takes hold, it is twisted and exploited. Nature eventually tries to make herself heard, forcing the characters in the later stories to turn back time and reconsider what they almost lost. 

We now know that coronavirus most likely emerged via the large-scale wildlife ‘wet markets’ in China. These were rightly condemned by environmentalists, but also recognised as an unfortunate necessary exploitation of wildlife for rural communities, facing little other choice for survival in a market-driven economy that had left them far behind. 

The direct ‘reason’ for coronavirus living among us lies with humans. But its creation is part of a much thornier predicament: how we can exist respectfully as human beings among nature, whilst also pursuing what we’re told is of the greatest value by the systems built around us? 

One of those will soon have to shift. Lockdown perhaps gave us a glimpse of what’s possible. We are not greater than nature – we are part of it. 

As it forced a global pause upon us, the most idealistic of humans wondered if perhaps this was the seed of a new order being sown. If perhaps, as in Hefted, in order to continue living among her, the natural world was asking us to stop and consider what we might be willing to change.