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Following on from yesterday, another part of Rose Cartwright’s article caught my eye:

If the medical model is willing to examine its assumptions, it may admit that its research is often a repackaging of knowledge that the west has forgotten or destroyed. Every year, studies are published “proving” that things like nature, creativity, exercise and community make us happier, framing them as prescriptions for ills rather than age-old preventives.

The idea of prescription versus preventive speaks to something I’ve come across elsewhere1; that there is something structurally very wrong with a society that has to prescribe those things that should be part and parcel of people’s lives, in order to cure the ‘ills’ arguably caused by the demotion of the very same things in favour of productivity and such.

  1. Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks certainly touches on it, but given I don’t currently have a copy, I can’t quote from it [↩]

The following quote from this article caught my attention.

My disorder … was the part of me who always knew I was worth protecting.

This is a perspective on mental illness that has never really occurred to me. Yes, I understand that it can be a protective reaction gone awry. But the idea that it’s fuelled by a sense of self-worth, albeit one buried deep in the subconscious, is something I’ve not considered before.

For me, an absence of self-worth goes hand-in-hand with anxiety and depression, fuelled by a desire to be ‘normal’ – whatever that is! So to see a mental disorder as coming from an inherent sense of self-worth, however small and hidden that is, totally flips my usual perspective on its head. Changing my relationship to my anxiety is a strategy that helps, and this view could definitely help with taking a more kindly approach.

Two days of significantly improved weather and voila, three swallows arrived. Always a day to lift the spirits.

One way or another, I’m regularly passing through or am otherwise in the vicinity of the Somerset Levels. As a result, it’s difficult not to be aware of peat extraction.

The National Trust are taking mushrooms off the menu due to the use of peat in the production process. Got me thinking about whether peat is used in the production of mushrooms for Riverford Organics, where we get our veg box from. I’ve emailed them so we’ll see what response I get.

I love mushrooms. Makes me wonder about growing my own.

Keep looking out for our swallows. I saw Portland Bird Observatory reported their first on the 18th. The earliest ours have arrived is around the 28th but I’m ever hopeful they will turn up sooner.

Happy Vernal Equinox! The sun is up for more than 12 hrs now and it’s the start of astronomical spring. I don’t recall learning of the astronomical seasons before. There is a clear explanation on the Met Office website.

Even though we are not getting too many days with significant rainfall, there aren’t many at the moment where there is none at all. It’s rather telling that it only takes a few millimetres of rain and the quantity of surface water on both roads and fields is very visible.

I don’t recall ‘mud season’ carrying on for this long. We are over half way through March and I’ve got to admit it’s somewhat passing me by, in the sense that its differentiation from February is not that great. Spring is definitely happening and I appreciate the bird song, the blossom, the flushes of green in the hedges, but it would be nice to have it drier underfoot. Going outside still largely requires donning wet weather gear.

I finished listening to This Changes Everything yesterday. At nearly 21 hours listening its quite the marathon but had I read it instead I suspect I would have struggled to maintain momentum. Not that its difficult to read/listen to, but there is a lot of it.

I felt quite drained today because its so hard hitting. It’s going to take me a while to process but right now it feels like I can’t bury my head in the sand about what we are doing to the planet. I don’t know what that means in terms of what I personally can do, given it’s pretty overwhelming, but I hope I don’t just let it slide.

I had been planning to write about my impressions and such from listening to Four Thousand Weeks but I’m going to buy the book so that I can go through and make notes. While there was no one thing that stood out as deeply profound1, it was full of thought provoking points that made me want to go away and think about them. Listening to a book like this is fine, but it does make it tricky when you want to stop and note something down.

Additionally, I was in the middle of listening my way through Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything when my reserved copy of Four Thousand Weeks became available, so I’ve immediately picked up where I left off with the former. It’s a pretty dense book, in a good way, so all my attention is on that now, and I want to finish that before I return to Burkeman.

  1. This originally said ‘there was nothing that stood out as deeply profound’. When I read it again later I realised that was not quite what I meant, so I’ve changed it.[↩]