“Negativity and angst dissolved. Silence seeped into our spines, relaxing our amplified neural conversations and untying cranky muscles. We were just two insignificant human specks surrounded by a massive, glacier-carved swamp; its deep bowl filled with the layering detritus of millennia…”

Illustration by Janet Hamlin for AJN. All rights reserved.

The above quote is from the July Reflections essay in AJN. We’ve been running this column for decades, each month a one-page personal essay by a different outside author, many but not all of them nurses.

The author of “Of Swamps and Pandemics” in July (free until August 20) is Pamela Sturtevant, a nurse in Massachusetts. She writes deeply and well about a simple thing: taking a walk with a companion in an ancient and fabled swamp during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Taking refuge in ‘deep time.’

While the most frightening surges of the coronavirus may be in the past, and the initially bewildering and all-powerful virus has been tamed by vaccines and precautions if not vanquished, our world hardly feels more stable than it did a year ago. Smoke from wildfires 3,000 miles to the west recently tinted a sickly yellow the air of states in the Northeast. Everything is connected. Political instability fomented by demagogues and misinformation seems here to fill the vacuum left by old certainties like the orderly progression of the year’s seasons and weather.

And so this essay resonates far beyond its moment. It’s about leaving behind the usual human time scale of action and reaction, assertion and response, the cycles of appetites and emotion and habit that shape our days. And it’s about entering a different kind of time scale that has proceeded by centuries and perhaps millennia—and finding it both eerie and comforting at the same time.

Walking and listening as ancient healing activities.

But most of all it’s about walking and listening. The simplest and most grounding (and ancient) of human behaviors, ones we rarely make time for.

What’s listened for? What’s heard? What’s imagined? What settles and what rises to the surface? That depends on the listener. But we hope you’ll take a moment to read this imaginative and thoughtful essay as a brief respite in your week. As the author writes:

 “[W]e dreaded returning to the pandemic, with all its caustic complexities….In the Hockomock we could breathe. Just breathe.”

You can also listen to a podcast reading of this and other AJN Reflections essays at the following web page (we’re adding our growing library of podcasts to Spotify in the near future as well, for easier listening and access).