Eco-mindfulness through Home Gardening

Being an ardent plant enthusiast & advocate of responsible living, in my perspective, the word Sustainability always brings up the twin word Mindfulness. Home Gardening (now taking shape as ‘Terrace Gardening’ or ‘Urban Farming’) has emerged as one such mindful hobby, that also contributes to sustainability in more than one way. As the pandemic added to the woes, my home garden was a blessing to help balance my health (mental, physical, and emotional), while keeping my sustainability goals. Happy to share the benefits I and my family reaped and pictures of my Green Hobby over the years!

Natural Stressbuster 

When you are stressed in your daily chores, I have heard many say that taking a quick walk bare foot on Earth and feeling the soil/grass, gives us a much-needed grounding to bounce back. Based on my personal experience, this statement is certainly true. When I am in my home garden, working on the preparation of the soil bed, and caring for the plants (with trimming, weeding and such activities), I lose myself among the calmness of Mother Nature and revel in its beauty and wonder. The green of the garden (among the rest of the colours) is also pleasing to the eyes & mind and has the capacity to calm every other raging emotions. The cool touch of wet earth/grass on my bare foot makes me want to take a deep breath that sends me a message of affirmation that everything is okay, and my Earth will keep me company all my life and embrace me beyond, eliminating the feeling of loneliness.

Also, when we have blooming flowers in our garden (specifically Tulips while in the US, Dahlia, Roses and others), the beauty of the different colours of bloom was like the garden was smiling at us. Never failed to bring a smile to our faces whatever we were feeling till that instant. 

Exhilaration of Creating

The same activities of making the garden bed and caring for the seeds/saplings sown that ground me also give me a high with a sense of exhilaration when I see the shrub/herb/tree flower, laden with fruits of labour and care. Makes me feel that I have done my job as a carer right for the ground and plant flourish. It is the same feeling of seeing your child grow and achieve. This plant/tree is in a sense my child as well. 

Good Health

When your home garden also bears vegetables and fruits, you enjoy the garden to fork experience that enables you to know that the food that you eat has been organically grown. There is also a sense of pride that this food was my effort from start (sowing it to start with) till the end (arriving as the edible dish that adorns the dining table). This also weighs much lesser on the expense pattern of the family as the monetary cost incurred in much less in comparison to a store-bought yield. 

Gardening is the best combination of physical, mental, and emotional workout that you can ever have in one single activity. 

By staying outdoors, you are absorbing natural source of Vitamin D (directly from the Sun) that helps in strengthening of bones & immune system. This also benefits weight loss as per some and helps in reducing depression. Depending on the geographical location, make sure that you step out in the right kind of sun to benefit from it.  

The physical activities that you would involve in while gardening in activities like, prepping the garden bed, sowing, weeding, watering, trimming, cleaning debris & getting rid of pests, and finally reaping the fruits of this labour also helps in physical fitness and weight reduction as different parts of your body (and hence different muscles) are used. 

It can also be a family bonding activity that enhances the emotional connectedness of the family members, especially with the younger ones. While doing so, it also serves as a tool of destressing thereby bringing a holistic wellbeing for the entire family and understanding the science behind it. The same can be the case for an entire community, when you have an option for a Community Garden.

A Sense of Agency & Empowerment

With all the above health benefits, it translates to a hidden reduction in the cost of maintaining the personal wellbeing through not just procurement costs but also through health care and hospitalisation cost being nullified in many cases, including the most seen one of Vit D deficiency that is to be repaired with the help of medicinal/serum supplements.

If you are maintaining a Community Farm (or your friends doing some organic farming ventures in their part-time), it can cater to the needs of the local community and more, by bringing in an additional source of income when you can find the buyers for your produce through your community network. When we can showcase these benefits, we inspire more people in our sustainability journey.

Sustainability begins at home

In school I remember reading about the topsoil erosion and its impact on climate and environment. The easiest way to stop this is by growing grass native to our locality was the solution given in the textbook. Home garden is also a way by which every individual can contribute towards ending the topsoil erosion, maintain balance in water cycle (again a middle school concept), thereby positively impacting the climate change and leading to a more sustainable way of live for our next generations to survive on our planet earth.

There are a lot more benefits than what I have listed above in having a home garden. Do share your take on the same in the comments.

This blog is part of Blogchatter’s #CauseAChatter challenge - #EnvironmentalTalks and #MentalHealthTalks. 

Lockdown Chaos: Disparities for the Primary Caregivers (Part 1 of 2)

One year after the first announcement of lockdown in India, I wrote a post on Momspresso on the topic I am not okay as a weekly challenge prompt. While writing that blog was cathartic, the constant changes due to the COVID restrictions, the new variants of the virus, the uncertainty of this pandemic lifestyle comes back to haunt us a lot. In these uncertain times, when schools went online, and work came into my home, I lost my personal space & “Me-time” routines. 

As an EdTech & Life Skills Consultant, I worked from home for the most part of my work engagements, yet there was a routine to it. I would finish my work, when my family was away from home in school and office respectively. In fact, I would also squeeze in some self-care routines daily to keep my cool when the family returned home in the evening. In the last year+ my routines have gone for a toss including the family chores.

The lack of routines, private space, and time for the primary caregiver (home maker) has also brought with it the focus on imbalanced division of labour within the home. While the home is everyone’s responsibility, most of the daily chores such as the upkeep of the house, inventory management & maintenance, bringing edible food to the table, catering to the never-ending snack requests of bored family members who do not understand or realise what goes into getting a quick bite-snack ready-to-consume leaves very little time for the primary caregiver for self-care and personal time. If this primary caregiver is also a part-time or full-time working person, then there is absolutely no time for anything else other than crossing out the to-do list from morning when they are awake till the time their body shuts down in exhaustion in the night. Add to this the fiasco of online school and the emotional toll that it has taken on the child’s psych and development. Not all schools and teachers are even partially trained to handle the nuances of online school along with the socio-emotional parameters that need to be given special care in this modality. 

Even in the so-called progressive homes where we celebrated equal participation, the pandemic showed that it really wasn’t the case. There was still quite a lot of imbalances where the primary care giver is implicitly expected to be the one to do the following:

• Plan & Provide for Breakfast, Lunch, & Dinner and the odd snacks: Includes working with available resources inside home when there was strict lockdown, plan for refilling the dwindling supplies in the kitchen stock and be prepared for those uninformed requests of odd hour snacks because you couldn’t order in during the strict lockdown periods. This has a secondary problem of additional work of pots and pans being used, cleaned, and stored appropriately. There were days when domestic support was unavailable, and the family wasn’t even aware that they had to pitch in till either they were told or in some cases the caregiver had an emotional breakdown to bring to the attention of the family that (s)he needed help.
• Teaching Assistant (TA): The unwritten expectation of being the TA even outside the lockdown was there, but the lockdown saw the primary caregiver huff and puff and juggle with the available time at hand to ensure that the child(ren) sat through the online class, did their homework and class works (that were usually done in school and hence was never on the caregiver responsibility plate), projects – specifically group projects follow up on WhatsApp and hangouts, revision before the continuous year-long assessments, and fill in for the lack of understanding that they have due to not being able follow the class due to internet connectivity and clarity on a regular basis. If an educated stay-at-home-parent finds this difficult, then we can only imagine the plight an un(der)educated parent or an educated-working-parent would have been through.
• Routines: They are always there for a very good reason. You know what to expect and hence you can plan for contingencies. This way even the rare case where something that wasn’t anticipated happens, we are able to cope. Pandemic saw to it that all routines went out the door when the entire family started staying indoors. Everyday was a new day, new pattern, and hence new adaptation. Change management usually has a peak (when emotions are at a high), lull (when we start questioning the purpose of the change), and a plateau (when we enjoy the new norm while we prepare ourselves) before the next change that is around the corner comes upon us. Unfortunately, pandemic did not give us this luxury. There were only peak after peak that leads to exhaustion due to emotional overdose. Even those who were emotional intelligence or mindfulness practitioners, the pandemic induced anxiety & uncertainty caught up with them, pushing almost everyone into a collective burn out.
• Emotional Numbness: The loss of job, finances, lifestyle, routines, lives of loved ones and otherwise, was too much that there has been a collective numbing of emotions in dealing with the grief that these loses usually trigger. Added to this was the inability to follow through with the mourning rituals due to the COVID restrictions. In the process of following the SMS protocols, despite the availability of technology to stay connected, the personal touch that is paramount in dealing with grief was missing. The losses also were quite sudden which rendered those affected by it in a state of shock. Without the support system and the rituals of handling grief most moved from shock to numbing of emotions as they did not know what else to do. The grief was either suppressed or repressed and we know what happens when either of the routes are taken without handling grief as it should be.
• Domestic Violence, Child Marriage & Child Labour: In some cases, with the entire family stuck indoors and no reprieve to reach for support there has been an increase in the cases of domestic violence. Loss of income and rise of expenses ended up in many getting their underage children to go to work or to get them married off (mostly girls). 

These are just some of them among many such deviations from what we knew life as usual. 

While I enumerate the problems that contribute to the disruption of mental wellbeing of self and the family, what can we as individuals do to ensure our mental safety and that of our families in that order. You can never pour from an empty cup, which means the first need is to ensure our own mental and physical wellbeing. Will elaborate them in the coping mechanisms I benefitted from, in the second part. 

Were you a primary caregiver & have similar or other experiences? Would love to hear about it from you.

This blog is part of Blogchatter’s #CauseAChatter challenge - #GenderTalks and #MentalHealthTalks. Incidentally, this is also my 100^th blog.

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