Immigrants on the Move

The house where I am staying in the UK is over the road from a large natural park. As with so many British parks, it was once the hunting grounds of royalty including Henry VIII. There are man made lakes (pool/reservoir?), pathways, and even wild horses roaming free. The road the house is situated on is a busy throughway with traffic running past all hours of the day and night. You are twenty minutes from Walsall a major city and 25 minutes from Birmingham City Centre – this is not the country and yet in moments you can forget that cars and rushed and harried people exist.

My friend who I am staying with is lucky enough to have a beautiful long garden which most mornings, as I wake with my body clock refusing to move from Baku time, is filled with busy and noisy birds. There is noise and life throughout the day, and the realisation hit me a few days after arriving; the wildlife in Baku is silent. This is not to say there is no wildlife. The golf course complex where we lived was full of hooded crows, and more variety arrived in winter, and they could occasionally be noisy and obnoxious, but it wasn’t the chatter. There wasn’t the community of wildlife that seems to exist here. There was a silence which caused an eerie quiet. The landscape was brown dust dotted with plastic and rubbish, there were few plants growing, and the only movement would often be stray dogs or cats.

In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. John Muir.

This is not the case in the whole of Azerbaijan, there are many green and lush places, many we didn’t manage to visit or travel to. But in Baku there was a feeling that anything good in the ground had been sucked dry and left barren and it filled me with sadness. I have heard people compare Azerbaijan to Spain in terms of the landscape, and while I can understand why that comparison might occur, for me it does not ring true. Yes there are fields of olives (producing oil at far cheaper prices than the 18€ a bottle Spanish olive oil is currently selling at), there are farms, but there is no wilderness in the most alive sense of that word.

The visit to Spain two weeks ago was a shock, they have had very little rain and in the region of Malaga it is said they would need it to downpour every day for a month for nature to receive sufficient water to once again thrive. The areas that would normally be green in March looked scorched and brown. The country is calling out for winter. Yet in spite of that the wildlife still sings, the mornings are still full of birds chattering and preparing for the day. There are parks of flowers that need very little water to survive and in the wilder areas there are still plants growing. There is a noise and a feeling of aliveness in the air.

Quite often we don’t realise what is making us feel uncomfortable in a situation until we step out of it. We need the distance for perspective, for reflection. I don’t think I truly understood France until I moved to Spain and had the time to reflect on the situations I’d been dealing with there. Stepping away from Baku, the lack of wildlife is deafening in my memories. Even the nature reserve we visited, we saw a few gulls and that was it. For me the sounds of nature are a reminder to be present to the beauty all around us. To stop and enjoy (and in my case often laugh) at the interactions between animals. Yesterday we saw wild horses on our walk, as well as cheeky robins, and serene geese and at a time when things feel chaotic and uncertain it filled me with calm.