In 2018 Rebecca Solnit wrote a piece for Orion Magazine and foresaw this:”We are going to have to stay home a lot more in the future. For us that’s about giving things up. But the situation looks quite different from the other side of all our divides …From outer space, the privileged of this world must look like ants in an anthill that’s been stirred with a stick: everyone constantly rushing around in cars and planes for work and pleasure, for meetings, jobs, conferences, vacations, and more. This is bad for the planet, but it’s not so good for us either. Most of the people I know regard with bemusement or even chagrin the harried, scattered lives they lead. For the privileged, the pleasure of staying home means being reunited with, or finally getting to know, or finally settling down to make the beloved place that home can and should be, and it means getting out of the limbo of nowheres that transnational corporate products and their natural habitats — malls, chains, airports, asphalt wastelands — occupy. It means reclaiming home as a rhythmic, coherent kind of time. The word radical comes from the Latin word for root. Perhaps the most radical thing you can do in our time is to start turning over the soil, loosening it up for the crops to settle in, and then stay home to tend them.”

I read this back in 2018 and had forgotten about how much it resonated with what I was trying to build for myself here at home. But of course I’m one of the privileged. I think of the refuges in war-torn countries, families that have had to leave their homes because of gang violence, communities and cultures that have been uprooted by extractive industries that feed the privileged’s lifestyle. It’s time for all of us to reflect on what this enforced home sequestration has revealed to us about the ways we might change our attitude towards home, towards our lifestyles, what we really do need and ways we might take back our responsibility to change the impacts we have on the earth and on each other.