The audio that accompanies this article in The Guardian broke my heart, and I’m still thinking about it, especially when I hear a new seasonal visitor has returned to nest in the forest near our house. I’m not sure why we humans are continuing to ignore warnings that we have very little time to change how we live to ensure future generations of humans and other species can have a livable planet.

I think part of the problem is that the people who wield the most power in the world live in large cities. Some of them possibly have country homes as well, but they do not have a healthy relationship with nature and therefore don’t care about it beyond what it can give them; they try to control it, bend it to their will, extract from the natural world things that will make them more and more money. It is difficult to care about what you can’t see.

When I lived for a brief time in London in the mid-80s, I knew a young woman who had just moved to the UK from the Cayman Islands. Maria and I both shared much of the excitement and challenges of coming from a small place and living in a massive city, but she had a physical challenge I didn’t have: she was often uncomfortable because she had never worn shoes for any long period of time. She grew up walking on bare feet in sand, not because they were poor, because they weren’t, but because they didn’t need shoes. She found the cobbles and pavement of London hard and noisy, wearing shoes and socks constricting.

She said couldn’t get the sense of the land, couldn’t feel a part of the place without her feet in the sand, in the soil. She was homesick in part because she missed her family, but just as much because of the loss of a connection to the land and the freedom of living so closely with the natural world. To be honest, I didn’t know what she was talking about. Who wanted to live in a backwards rural setting any more? I certainly didn’t. Give me history and theatre and art and Oxford Street and pubs and life!

I lost touch with Maria, but I would bet she returned to her home, and so did I.

I hear a robin.