Ten years ago today the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted, closing European airspace for almost a week.

I wrote about the experience then as that rare thing, a grand collective event without trauma ( https://booktwo.org/notebook/grounded-volcano-fictions/). Would it were the same today. But I do keep coming back to the words of Carol Anne Duffy, who wrote in a poem commemorating the event:

“Britain’s birds sing in this spring / From Inverness to Liverpool, from Crieff to Cardiff, / Oxford, Londontown, Land’s End to John O’ Groats. / The music’s silent summons, / That Shakespeare heard and Edward Thomas and, briefly, us.”

I'm not in the UK, and I despise the British government, and all who make of this a war, and will use it to spur nationalism and division well into the future. But I hope when this is over those of us who are able, who are lucky, who survive, still hear that silent summons.

One service Eyjafjallajökull provided was to put to bed the climate sceptics' lie that volcanoes emitted more CO2 than human activity. https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php?p=5&t=236&&a=28

Perhaps this experience will put to bed others: that we can survive alone, that we don't need collective action to care for one another, that the worst predictions never happen, that we don't need to prepare. That we can't change.

In the mean time, listen for the birdsong. Nature isn't "coming back", it's been here all along, and we - those of us lucky, safe, secure, and grateful - have a moment, in the shadows, to attend to it more closely than usual.