It’s mental health awareness week and another opportunity for me to grumble to anyone who will listen about why on earth we think there is still a problem with “awareness” and why we can’t just do something about it instead.
Anyway, the theme this year is nature which is precipitating a deluge of articles about the benefits of walking through the woods and listening to the sea on your headphones when you go to bed inevitably making you want to get up for a wee.
But another momentous thing happened this week too when my daughter turned twenty and left me with no children in their teens.
“You’ll be old in another twenty years,” she tells me while polishing off a pain au chocolat.
“I already feel old,” I tell her.
She piles up three blueberries on top of one another like the pictures of smooth stones you might see on the pages of a therapist’s website.
I find the childishness of it a comfort.
Later we are out for a walk in “Happy Valley” a name that sounds cheaper than it is and always seems to belie the beauty of views across the Sussex fields.
We were out in nature but it was the nature of the people I was with that made it a joy.
For all that will be written this week about connecting with nature, walking through woodland, dipping toes in streams, and listening to birdsong it will be in the work of connection and self-acceptance that feelings of durable peace and harmony take hold.
The loving of one’s own nature, darkness and light, is the portal through which it becomes easier to love the nature of the people who surround us and the physical nature of the world that we share.
My children have been instrumental in moving me towards greater self-acceptance than I once had.
When I look at them it is hard to feel anything too bad about myself if I could have had a hand in creating and raising two individuals I love with such intensity for their beautiful nature.
The view from the valley reminds me of one from a mental hospital I once knew.
Set in such beautiful grounds with sprawling verdant hills in all directions it seemed like a waste.
In those days everything looked grey no matter how colourful it really was. Connection with nature limited by an inability to accept the nature of myself.
Back in the valley, I’m watching my daughter pick all the filling out of her sushi and eating the rice while the dog dribbles on my feet waiting for a piece of pastry from a cheese and onion roll.
There’s a gentle argument going on between my son and daughter about attaching parking mirrors to the car so that she can practice her parking.
They chip at each other back and forth in a familiar way from which there will be no resolution just a gentle petering out.
In the evening my daughter sits with her friends in the garden after the rain has passed.
It’s May but they have blankets and hot water bottles as they clutch their Prosecco glasses and as I walk back towards the house a mixture of laughter and the song of a goldfinch fills the air.
The blooms on the cherry tree are as fulsome as I’ve seen and time passes so fast that it won’t be long until the birds are swooping down to pick off the reddest fruits before I can get to them.
It is the order of things. Nature.
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