Footprints

Badger foot. Their prints are ant canyons in the mud. Get up close and smell the earth as if it were the last time you ever will.

Months have passed since I lay on the grassy slopes beside the badger den and breathed in the musk of hair and mud.

The weather was more its usual English, wet self and the grass steamed as if exhaling into the morning sky.

I thumbed the prints in the mud. More connected, then, to the wilderness than what has been possible in the months since the pandemic took hold.

The longer the time stretches on there is a shortness of breath. Not much but just enough to taste its effect on the narrowing sight of mind that comes with isolation.

-Wait.

Look at me talking as if it were worse, as it it were my body incarnated, by neck knelt on, my breathe halted. No. There is extreme privilege in my isolation, my shortness of breath.

There is no system destined to hold me in that death-place, oppression-place. No knee pinning my neck down in my memory-place. Memory. That too is privilege. No end yet.

No merit of mine that this is true in fact it is I who am part of that system, part of that problem. No my isolation is safe, no comparison possible. But as my thoughts linger on recent events the photo of those days flash in front of the footprint.

- These.

Are.

Days.

To.

Hold.

In.

Our.

Minds.

and.

Hearts.

Breathe. Act.

Can you breathe at all? Can you act? Can you march?

Deep gulps of misty morning air turned into muggy mask half breaths.

Connection to nonhuman animals reduced to watching the neighbour’s regal dogs claim their morning window territories, barking at the lack of bin collections.

Connections to humans now come with virtual background amusements and 8pm clapping on a Thursday.

Have we changed our ways? Some of us are holding each other’s gaze more, gauging awareness to the space between us. Others pretend to not have seen the couple jump two metres out their hurried path. Others kill or walk with killers along the system.

There’s a different taste to the air and the sun has dried up the mists.

I don’t think people can quite believe it’s been three months. Looking at the badger print is perhaps the vital grounding experience I needed as I grasped at an excuse to pretend it isn’t 3pm.

Bet they’re still there. Pandemics expose us but exile badgers to peace without my human, joyful seeking.

Bet if I went there now - trekked through the covid-confined, orange glow city, found the dark and the mud - the sun would rise on the same coarse hair pressed into that footprint. Black and white, gentle breeze causing gentle movement in that strand upon a moment in time that now holds me in the dark this night, as I type accompanied by the structures of violence.

Badger foot. Trot, trotting through woodland. Padding softly through the muddy paths of my drifting mind.

What memory holds you now? The last great one before all of this? When will we let it drop us so that we can be held by new ones, ones beyond the masks of fear and taste of tinned potatoes?

Regardless, those photos from recent days will stay...because they must. They must not be allowed to gather dust.

No room for dust in the streets when blood flows so incessantly. No moment for dust to cling to those who continue to march onwards.

Are you marching now? Are your footprints in the mud or are they there in the blood? Don’t know? Get up close and smell the earth as if it was the last time you ever will.