For years, the seasons passed Chloe Dalton by in a blur—like they do for most of us. Travel, deadlines, work, the constant churn of ambition and obligation.
Then, during the pandemic, she spends lockdown in an old house in the English countryside. On a walk one day, she comes across a leveret (a baby wild hare) and nurses it back to life. What ensues is a surreal and moving friendship, as the hare becomes a free-range companion, hopping around the house, snoozing quietly by Dalton's side as she writes, running in from the fields when called, drumming softly on the duvet to get Dalton's attention, even giving birth and raising babies inside the house. Spending hundreds of lonely, quiet hours with the leveret—which she never named—Dalton learned to understand its habits and needs, seeing the world from its point of view.
"I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature, no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me. For many years, the seasons had largely passed by, my perceptions of the steady cycle of nature disrupted by travel and urban life. I had observed nature in broad brushstrokes, in primary colors, at a surface level. I had been most interested in whether it was dry enough to walk, or warm enough to eat outside with friends. I could identify only a handful of birds and trees by name. I hadn't observed the buds unfurling, the seasonal passage of birds, the unshakeable rituals and rhythms of life in a single field or wood. I now marveled at the purple tinge on the black feathers of a house martin—the smallest creature I had ever seen—which flew into the house one morning…observing the gleam of the sun on the mirror finish of its plumage, before releasing it into the air."
It's reminiscent of Marcus Aurelius noticing, as he does in a moving passage in Meditations (our favorite translation here) "The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven…Or how ripe figs begin to burst. And olives on the point of falling: the shadow of decay gives them a peculiar beauty. Stalks of wheat bending under their own weight. The furrowed brow of the lion. Flecks of foam on the boar's mouth."
There is beauty and peace in noticing. The small, daily transformations. The subtle shifts of light through the windows. The cracks on the sidewalk. The sounds of birds. The world is filled with things to see and hear.
Are you cultivating the stillness to notice them? To appreciate them? To let them into your life?
Six years after the COVID-19 pandemic, the world is loud and fast again. But the real question is: what were we supposed to learn from the moment when everything slowed down?
In this episode, Ryan talks with award-winning author Chloe Dalton about the strange stillness of those early pandemic months and how one unexpected encounter with a wild hare during lockdown completely changed the way she thought about time, work, and the life she was building.
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