Watching the news this past week should have come with a trigger warning. Just as I was settling down to a Friday night of relaxing TV, live news coverage rolled in. Rather than feeling an ease into the weekend, the politics of our day activated a sense of shock, disgust, anger and ultimately a sadness filled my body. What’s worse is that, as a new comer to living on my own, I didn’t know where to put all of these emotions. There was no mutual unpacking of reaction or bouncing thoughts and theories off of a housemate. Instead, I ended up sitting in this pool of mire trying to find something light to watch to counterbalance the unsettledness in my heart. Can any of you relate to this? I ask because my Facebook feed suggests that I am not alone.
I woke on Saturday morning in a melancholic mood, to say the least. I had set time aside to do some research for a Nature and Healing programme that I am working on for the Sanctuary. However, it was taking every ounce of energy to sit at my desk. So I decided to take things easy rather than quit altogether. Instead of sifting through academic articles, I picked up a beautiful book that was given to me as a gift. It’s called, “The Well Gardened Mind: Rediscovering Nature in the Modern World” by Sue Stuart -Smith. With a cup of tea in hand and the sun shining through the window, my mood was already lifting. However, it was Stuart-Smith’s call to place “care” at the centre of our lives that pulled me out of darkness.
Sue Stuart-Smith is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and the lead clinician for the NHS (National Health Service in the UK) in Hertfordshire, England. She is also an avid gardener. Her book is a combination of psychoanalysis, neuroscience and storytelling and it highlights the power of nature as an active agent in healing trauma, depression, stress and addiction. I was hopeful that somehow this book would inspire me to get back to my desk, or at least reconnect me to a sense of purpose that seemed to be lost after the night before’ s newscast.
Thankfully, I was right to pick up this book. Stuart- Smith’s storytelling caught my attention and her offering of a hypothesis that society has moved from a policy of ‘repair’ to ‘replace’ was intriguing. More specifically, she highlights a general cultural transition that moves from the much slower act of tending to and caring for into a faster paced reaction of finding a quick fix and moving on. She explains that this is not just about our personal values but it is a reflection of the world in which we live. In a roundabout way, she poses the question, how can we be radical and “place care at the centre of our lives” ? (p.32) This felt like a deep and direct response to the news I had witnessed the night before. It was enough to shift me from a place of near despondency into action.
In that moment, my mind moved to the corner patch in my garden in which the gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes were being swallowed whole by invasive vines. Last summer, I was exhausted and I had written that corner off as a dark jungle of chaos. One that if I closed my eyes tight enough, it might just disappear into a pile of greenery that adds a bit of mystery. Looking back, this is most likely a reflection of my mind state.
Yet, here I was, on this Saturday morning, reading a gardening book and asking myself, what would my life look like if I placed ‘care’ at the centre of everything? Could it combat the apathy that had developed in relation to my gooseberries and blackcurrants? If so, what other apathies that are hidden in my mind could it combat?
So I peeled myself off of the couch, grabbed my best set of iron clad gardening gloves and tackled the brambles. After only ten minutes of cutting and clearing, my fruit bushes emerged with room to breathe. I decided to give myself a short window of working for forty minutes. In these forty minutes, not only was the dark corner of chaos transformed, but a pair of robins happily became my new companions, I could hear the laughter of children climbing trees and my mind was a much safer place than it was an hour before. I was no longer ruminating and making negative predictions of what was to come, I was simply present to the feeling of air on my skin, the sound of birdsong and laughter and the smell of spring arriving. Most importantly, apathy was replaced with hope. I could breathe. My negative predictions were fading and being replaced with evidence that there was gooseberry jam on the horizon!
Now, I am not saying that clearing a patch in the garden is the answer to the political pageantry that is playing out on the world stage at the moment. But placing ‘care’ at the centre of our lives is something that each of us can do. It is an antidote to feeling helpless. It is an antidote to sitting in the mire of difficult emotions. Even if care only looks like watering and tending to a house plant, or spending extra time with a pet, or touching in with a neighbour/friend who you know is having a hard time, it is connection. And what we need more than ever in these polarising times is connection.
So if you would like to join me for some connection on Tuesday morning at 10am at the Sanctuary’s live online session, please do. This week we will be doing a reflection on the question of “how can we place ‘care’ at the centre of our lives”?
-Jane
To listen to and download a mindfulness meditation to cultivate care in our lives, click the link below:
My Silent Place 
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