green space

Picture from me and my wife's hike up Whittaker Wilderness Peak Trail

"As a writer, I find gardens essential to the creative process; as a physician, I take my patients to gardens whenever possible. All of us have had the experience of wandering through a lush garden or a timeless desert, walking by a river or an ocean, or climbing a mountain and finding ourselves simultaneously calmed and reinvigorated, engaged in mind, refreshed in body and spirit. The importance of these physiological states on individual and community health is fundamental and wide-ranging. In forty years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens." -Oliver Sacks (source: James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter)

Lately I’ve been hearing two pieces of advice for dealing with quarantine that needle me a little. The first is to go outside often and get some fresh air. The second is to make a space in your home that is designated just for work.

Neither of these things is easy for me and my wife in our little one-bedroom breezeway apartment. We had been planning on starting our home-buying search about this time. One of the things we talked about was yard space, and we agreed that we wanted a little room to garden and enjoy the outdoors, but not a huge lawn to mow. Maybe just enough grass to lie down on.

I can’t help feeling a little bitter that we’ve had to put off that dream. I think we’re all learning a lesson about the value of outdoor space right now. A few of the folks I work with seem to really take it for granted. I guess I did too before my wife and I got into hiking. A few years ago, the closing of trailheads probably wouldn’t have even been on our radar.

It’s important for me to remind myself that if not being able to hike or look at real estate are the worst hardships I’ve had to deal with, I’ve gotten off really lucky. Yesterday we were finally able to get out to Cougar Mountain and enjoy a pretty quiet hike.

I hope that we as a country (or a state, or a city) come out of this crisis with a renewed sense of the importance of greenspace. I also hope we start thinking about ways that we can make it a little more affordable for everyone to be able to own a little bit of outdoor space, where they can garden and have privacy and pride of ownership. It’s all well and good to tell people how important it is to spend time outdoors and in nature, but we need to make sure that stays possible.