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In May, I decided I needed to give my days more structure to root me in the here and now. I started to write a page a day, following a practice the writer Jenn Ashworth suggests—100 days of writing,which my partner adopted too.

And so I went on to map these days, these moments of noticing, continuing to take photographs and write about them too. Most are rooted in what’s around me: the flowers, the birds, the changing light.

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Now, from the Highlands, I Google for a timeline of what’s been happening in the year. There are so many events easily missed.

My search turns up: heavy rains in Brazil; floods in Jakarta; severe weather and tornadoes in the US; a super cyclone hits the coasts of India and Bangladesh; another cyclone hits India. A record Arctic heatwave sees Siberian wildfires burn areas beyond the size of Greece. There have been avalanches in Turkey and Pakistan, earthquakes in the US, Turkey, Puerto Rico, Croatia. And I know that in Scotland, someplace I think of as being relatively benign in terms of weather events, we’ve had flooding and landslides.

I watch the new force behind the Black Lives Matter movement because of the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and know that these are the names that have made headlines across the world; we know that there are others. Each country looks for and calls out its own equivalences. We hope that this (newfound for some) awareness of racism that has swept the
world, and prompted all kinds of institutions to say they will ‘do better’, will stick.

The list goes on. California is ablaze, and another Black man, Jacob Blake, has been shot in Wisconsin. A hurricane has battered Louisiana’s coast, and India records 77000 new cases of Covid in a day. In better news, there are reports that four years have passed since the last record of wild polio on the African Continent and, at least at the height of the lockdown, carbon emissions fell. But amongst the hardships and grief that many people face, these feel distant, abstract successes.

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Recently, I came across a note I’d written in 2009 about something that the Canadian photographer Ed Burtynsky had said about the documentary about his work, Manufactured Landscapes: ‘To me it’s always interesting to show the man-altered (sic) landscape as man (sic) dwarfed in a theatre of his own making. That new sublime is actually our own technological and human expansion and progress. We no longer fear nature, we fear ourselves and our force upon the planet’. There’s an apparent beauty in some of Burtynsky’s almost abstract-looking photographs, before you realise what it is you’re looking at—aerial views of landscapes that look like cubist abstractions are tar sands or quarries that can be seen from space; a beautiful orange-scarlet swathe of colour that bisects an almost monochrome view of a landscape is a river red in toxicity. He’s photographed devastated landscapes: mountains of circuit boards and rusting tankers, aground and unimaginably huge against the tininess of the humans, in bare feet and t-shirts, that will dismantle them for scrap.

We fear ourselves and our force on the planet. We fear the unknown and, no matter where we are, at the moment it’s hard to balance awe with any kind of adrenaline-soaked positive fascination. I think back to the sublime, a fear where we have an element of control. In these uncertain times, we fear ourselves; we fear the harm we might do; the harm that might be done to us.

In 1770, the year that William Wordsworth was born, to quote Wikipedia ‘James Cook claims the East Coast of Australia (New South Wales) for Great Britain.’ In Wordsworth’s lifetime, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), and in his lifetime he would have seen laws to abolish slavery fail before the Abolition of Slavery Act was passed in 1833, witnessed British colonial expansion, as well as the effects of the Industrial Revolution including the rise of the Chartists, and I read how much of the Industrial Revolution was based on the proceeds of slavery.

We each have to hold so many things, so many lives—our own, and our family’s, our community’s (however we define them). When we look at this new need for social distancing here in 2020, or a longstanding worry about walking home late at night, or having a fear of the police, we can see that the reality is that for some of us, our knowledge of the dangers we face isn’t new; we’ve always feared (for) ourselves, known our force on the planet.

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Sadiya Hartmann, in Lose Your Mother, writes about the ‘afterlife of slavery’, saying, ‘If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.’ Hartmann takes us further back to the complexities and complications of who became enslaved, and writes about the idea of the stranger, how that dictated who would be captured, who would be sold. It was not kin or clan who were kidnapped, but those who were outside, foreign, alien, disconnected. I wonder about the idea of the stranger, the idea of the other, us/them and how we value—or devalue—one another. Who we mean when we think about ourselves.

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On the 25th of May, the day that George Floyd was murdered by a white cop, at the cusp of the summer’s night, I stood at the window watching a herd of six red deer jump the fence from the trees at the far side of the field, and graze in the long grass beyond the burn, before skittering back into the woods. On the day that BLM protesters pulled down the slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol, 11th June, my motion sensor nature camera filmed hares in the garden, eating the bladder campion. Last week, as I saw the creeping ladies’ tresses that always signal the endgame of summer, filmed melancholy thistles, and watched the swallows gather before their long migrations south, I read that Covid cases reach 25 million worldwide, and that there have been over 800,000 deaths. How to get our heads around these numbers? How to imagine what it’s like some place else—in Kenosha Wisconsin, or Portland Oregon, or Chicago, where I lived for a couple of years. What if I wasn’t Scottish and living up here; Or, or, or, or…

We live within such contested times and are on one side of a wall or the other, on one side of an ocean or a channel or a strait. We look at gathering clouds and might hope for rain for our gardens or anticipate the theatre of a storm, or we may worry about flooding, or that the boat that we hope will take us to safety might be swamped and capsized, or that a lightning strike might start another wildfire.

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It’s been easy, easier, easiest perhaps, to concentrate on what’s been immediately before me. I don’t quite know what to do with the other stuff of the world. The swallows returned from their long haul flights from Africa; cuckoos arrived too after taking much the same journey; these returning birds, the summer migrants, have shifted and changed the tones of this ever adapting forest, adding harmonies and competing, overlapping choruses to the colours that shift and shimmer in various lights and wind directions. I’ve seen how the sun rises higher earlier to touch the roof then spill into the living room and onto the garden, and how, in high summer, the legacy of its light remains through the whole of the night. In our tiny plot we have planted a wildflower meadow, and it’s overrun now with what I once thought were dandelions but know now to be a mixture of dandelions and hawkweeds and cats-ears, but whatever, it’s been a swathe and sway of bright points. If I look closely, there are little asterisks of maiden pinks hiding between them. I didn’t notice before how these hawkweeds and hawkbits and dandelions and cats-ears (that all, still, look the same to me) wait for the sun to hit them before they open fully, and when they do there’s a mass of yellowheads. We’d hoped for more diversity in this tiny patch. For more bladder campion and red campion, and red clover, but the hares had come into the garden with far more frequency that we had thought, and they certainly had favourite plants to devour.

It’s the end of summer now, and the blaeberries are out and the creeping ladies’ tresses grow unobtrusively amongst the pines. Scotch Argus butterflies flurry up before me in the nearby meadow where the melancholy thistles grow, and it’s the first time I’ve paid these flowers any attention, see how they stand singular and proud. I used to think they were called melancholy thistles because of this singularity, but I read that when decocted into a wine, it was used to cure melancholia. And anyway, while they stand as singular stems, there’s a community of them dotted about this long grass, each flower in easy sight of another, and butterflies flit between them, and bees go from one to the next to the next.

Beyond the garden, the world is trying to return to normal. Schools are back, restaurants are open. Life begins to go on, and suddenly there’s a swathe of dandelion clocks, and a breeze lifts the seeds, sometimes intertwined, into the air, and out and away across the field. It doesn’t feel, yet, like the time, to decide to hope or to despair. Instead there’s a wait that feels sometimes manageable, sometimes interminable, and a wish for a new normal that is somehow quieter, slower, kinder and more equitable than what has gone before.