I’ve forgotten what day it is

Thirteenth Beach, Barwon Heads, Australia.

Today marked Day#44 of the Covid-19 imposed lockdown here in Victoria, Australia. The photograph is Thirteenth Beach, standing on which, one looks south to Bass Strait. Apart from the island of Tasmania, next stop from here is Antarctica. A remote part of the planet, then, and a splendid place to find oneself in relative isolation. I’ve begun each morning, religiously, with a stroll along the shore. Check the tide on my clever app before leaving the house so I know whether I’ll be walking at low tide, over a wide plain of hardened sand or picking through the rocks and splashing waves when the water’s high.

I read that it’s the gravitational pulls of the moon and sun that cause our seas to bulge and thereby create the high seas. I have time to check up on such things these days. These very different days, these endlessly-the-same days. Life has taken an unexpected turn for us all. How suddenly we’ve had to re-consider every aspect of our lives. Who could have expected the world would experience a pandemic that would shut down the very concept of human society? Something we’d taken for granted; a given. A right. The impact has been devastating for certain parts of the planet – for those people I grieve and hope for the speedy flattening of the curve. ‘Flattening of the curve’ – a new, insidious expression that has crept, virus-like, into our collective vernacular.

I am blessed to be here in this place through this time. It’s appropriate, then, that I not squander; but ponder. Breathe deeply and wonder at all things. Things like the tide. The sucking sound the sea makes as it retreats down the bank of the shore. The world of life left behind in a sea pool. The Sooty Oystercatcher picking away at the exposed reef with its long letterbox red beak. The Hooded Plovers scurrying on their rapid stilts at the water’s edge. The line of pale sodium light marking the coming dawn of another wondrous day. A day to be wholeheartedly and vigorously seized.