Growing Food in This Body: How Nature Helped Jaime Accept His Disability

There are so many lessons to learn from nature and all we have to do is give her our attention. However, in order to attend, we must be able to have access to nature in the first place. This is why I am so passionate about accessible nature spaces. Nature can teach us to have hope, to let go, to embrace, to take space, and the list goes on. When we create inaccessible nature spaces, we are telling disabled people that they are not welcomed to learn from nature like everyone else.

Image description: Side view image of Jaime snipping a flower bud with scissors.

Jaime, one of the participants from the Growing Food in This Body project, discusses in detail how nature helped them accept their disability:

"Deadheading taught me a lot about letting go. It seemed so counterintuitive, when I first heard of it. Cut off a flower in order to grow flowers? But by the time we come to deadhead a plant, the flower has served its purposes... I thought about the things I'm holding on to just because they were once alive, that are taking up space and choking off opportunities for new growth. I breathed out as I watched the sunflowers, midway through unfurling the petals I had made room to nurture, and I let go of my recently diagnosed hip dysplasia being cured. I deadhead that unnecessary thought that is keeping me in stasis, dreaming of a return to a thing which is now dead, and in its wake I leave space to move forward, to strategize ways to be mobile that work with my body. I give myself permission to stop holding myself on pause in the hope that physio will cure this. I plan for fundraising for an electric powerchair, which will give me back the mobility I was hoping physio would create in my legs. In my dream powerchair, I can allow myself to grow anew."

I had tears in my eyes when I first read this quote. I have worked with so many clients as an occupational therapist who were in the process of a major life change; getting a wheelchair, prosthetic limb, hearing aids, starting medication, etc. I have never (or could ever) inspire my clients to accept and have hope regarding their disability the same way that nature inspired Jaime to. Jaime continued to share with me how tending to abandoned gardens helps them tend to their own body:

"Being disabled, you have to constantly tend to your medical care because if you let it go, nobody else will do it, and nobody will chase you and make you do it. Your body is a garden, in that respect. If you don't water it, it'll get sick; if you don't tend it it will become overgrown, and it will be twice as much effort to return it to something approaching normal than if you'd kept up with it in the first place. So with every few inches of concrete I scrubbed, and every dead plant I broke out from soil that could still nurture if it was used right, I promised my body and my garden that I would treat it as what it should be - something that deserves daily nurturing and needs patient care to be at its best and doesn't need to be abandoned in disappointment if something goes wrong in it."

Jaime’s connection to nature makes me think of my time working in a nursing home. I often did therapy with my clients outside if the weather was warm enough. My clients would light up as the sun warmed their skin and breathe in deeply as they closed their eyes. Sometimes all we did was watch people walk past us and just sit in silence. My clients would always thank me profusely as I helped them return to their room - a poorly dimmed, cold, without a touch of home in the (lack of) decor. The thing is, many of my clients weren’t able to sit outside by themselves. There wasn’t a space that they had access to with an automatic door. The door to the outside area was ridiculously heavy ​to the point where​ I needed assistance every time I went outside. I also don’t think they would be able to sit outside alone without a staff member present..which would means their ability to go outside would depend on someone else’s availability.

Hospitals, clinics, nursing homes, etc. could benefit from having accessible nature spaces. There is already a wealth of research on how nature within the healthcare system could improve patient’s health and well-being. Occupational therapists could use those nature spaces to help clients learn how to take care of their bodies as they learn to tend to plants, similar to Jaime’s story. It makes me wonder…what needs to be done to get these healthcare facilities on board?

Image description: up-close photo of two flowers with bright yellow petals and dark red in the center. This photo was taken by Jaime.