When the world held its breath
Found Moments: vignettes pulled from the flow of travel and time
This post forms part of Found Moments — a series capturing quiet glimpses of humanity and the natural world, drawn from the flow of travel and time. Often unplanned. Always unposed.
A lone crow perched on a rural telephone wire during the 2020 lockdown, watching the quiet world below.
As the first lockdown of 2020 was announced, the country held its breath. Shops closed. Roads emptied. Calendars went quiet. The ever present background soundtrack of daily life was muted; in its place came birdsong, the buzz of insects, a rustle of leaves in the gentle exhalation of the breeze. There was a quietness, a calmness, a smallness about the land that I hadn’t experienced before and, as I eased into it, what I had previously thought of as ordinary became extraordinary. In the idyllic weather that blessed us that spring, I walked the perimeter of our small farm several times a day with my camera in hand, noticing the tiny things I might have once overlooked.
One morning, I stood beneath this telephone pole, camera in hand, watching a crow survey the silence. It was hunched up, looking down, the epitome of loneliness, standing upon wires providing connection within a disconnected world.
A swallow swept across the sky, its carefree acrobatics a stark contrast to the leaden crow. Lifting its head, the crow glanced towards the swallow; a brief connection, perhaps. Such was the choreography of life.
A swallow sweeps across a clear spring sky as a crow looks on from a nearby wire — stillness and motion in a single lockdown moment.
These images take me back to when we hung suspended in time. Stuck between enjoying the stillness but yearning to take flight; experiencing isolation but being present within it; swaying between uncertainty and hope.
This post first appeared on my Substack, My Journey With a Camera, on 18 June 2025