Our Wellbeing and Natural Connection

Hills and water
Panel 3. OUR WELLBEING AND NATURAL CONNECTION. “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may help and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike”. John Muir. John Muir understood that nature is not just a commodity, a warehouse of raw materials for our economic needs, but an essential element for our mental health and spiritual nourishment.
OUR WELLBEING AND NATURAL CONNECTION. “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may help and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike”. John Muir. John Muir understood that nature is not just a commodity, a warehouse of raw materials for our economic needs, but an essential element for our mental health and spiritual nourishment.
“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are not only useful as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life. Our National Parks by John Muir, 1901
North Light Arts – Dalziel and Scullion. An older woman is lying in amongst a thick carpet of wild garlic by a stream, rays of sunlight.
“A dose of greenspace could be just what the doctor ordered”. NHS Lothian publishes Green Health Strategy – June 2019.
A track winds its way alongside a sea loch. On the left old oaks line the track and ancient woodland on the right. Low moorlands in the background.
Keep close to Nature’s heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean. John Muir.
Our crude civilisation engenders a multitude of wants, and lawgivers are ever at their wits’ end devising. The hall and the theatre and the church have been invented and compulsory education. Why not compulsory recreation? John of the Mountains 1875: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir. Edited by Linnie Marsh Wolfe, 1938.
A group of primary age schoolchildren, some of the cubs, are busy tending to an allotment plot, planting seed in shallow trenches. A helper and others look on in the bright spring sun.
The Ridge, Baclkands, Dunbar. A group of young adults and their minder are arranging stones to mark borders in a community garden.
‘When we did the research, the evidence for nature working in health and wellbeing was overwhelming. It’s not just about exercise outdoors, which of course helps, but the connection is even more important.’ Karen MacKelvie, Counsellor, Shetland NHS Lothian publishes Green Health Strategy – June 2019. RSPB - NHS Partnership - Nature Prescribing in Shetland.
Panel 2 | A Gude Fechter
panel 4 | our house is on fire