Our medicine cabinet to celebrate Mental Health Awareness Week 10 - 16 May. Click on the cabinet, zoom in and click on the contents to find out what’s inside. Enjoy!
During lockdown in 2020, when we couldn’t all be together in the garden, we created this virtual community medicine cabinet as one way to stay connected and share strategies for wellbeing during an isolated and stressful time.
This was something I’d been working on for myself at home; reflecting on all the things that I found healing, helpful or nourishing in some way (these included: zines, seeds, microscopes, tinctures, herbs, medication, worms, nice smells, music, soil etc). I made a physical cabinet out of old pallets and wood from a skip, to hold all of these special things. Through this process I realized that sometimes when I am exhausted, unwell or stressed, I can forget what my medicines are and struggle to reach for them. Creating a medicine cabinet for myself, has been a really important way of reminding myself of my own strategies for building resilience, and helping me to access them when I need them. When I come across new medicines / ideas / things which help me in some way, I now have a place to put them. My medicine cabinet is beautiful and pink with a hexagonal window and spoons for handles. It is also jam packed with things that bring me joy.
I really wanted to share this process with people at the garden, and was curious to find out what things we might put in a collective medicine cabinet. This could be a way of both reminding ourselves of the personal strategies we already have, and sharing them with others, incase they could also be useful for someone else. This process also emerged out of our weekly zoom check-ins during lockdown, where we would talk about the things we were noticing around us, things we were struggling with and ways we were getting through these challenging times. We had a couple of focused ‘show and tells’ where people talked about what their medicines were, and sent in pictures and writing. Mirjam (our Ecotherapy Worker) compiled them into this beautiful virtual medicine cabinet.
Our cabinet is jam packed with many amazing medicines, including recipes and playlists, cats, pigeons, creative practices, meditation and ecotherapy techniques, observations about nature and our neighbourhoods, tarot cards, herbal remedies, puns and lots of plants! It was made collaboratively, with lots of care, love and compassion for ourselves and each other. To me, it is a testament to the individual and collective resources and resilience we have built, which enable us to get through tough times. I hope it will continue to provide healing and joy for anyone who stumbles upon it.
FFPG volunteers and buddies are now mostly back in the garden for ecotherapy sessions on Wednesdays and Fridays. For many of us the garden is also like a giant living medicine cabinet providing us with tasty food, inspiration, herbs, learning and connection.
by Hari Byles, Head Gardener at FFPG