My response to nature
This Unlocking Landscapes contribution has been written by Sarah Matthews. Sarah is totally blind and lives in London with her husband and son. She has chronic pain in her feet so is often a wheelchair user when out and about. Here she shares her reflections on landscape and connection to nature as someone with acquired impairments.
Listen to the contribution, read by Sarah Bell, above, or read in full below.
Living through this pandemic has focused my attention on my surroundings much more intently. It has definitely made me reflect and ruminate on issues that I have glossed over in the busy, eventful relentlessness of everyday life.
When I lost my sight suddenly in my 30s I found that I became acutely aware of sounds and textures and that being able to sit in the garden lifted my mood. I understood that our senses are intertwined and that we don’t normally realise this until something changes. I had previously taken my surroundings for granted, although one of the reasons we chose to live in South East London was because there were so many green spaces and easy connections to the coast by car.
I found myself feeling a deeper connection with our local parks after I became disabled as they held so many memories that spark visuals in my mind of the environment around me.
In the early days I was housebound and did not think that getting out was particularly important any more. Where we lived at the time, we used to see groups of parakeets hanging out in the trees and I once saw a woodpecker on a tree just outside our living room window, which was such a unique moment in time. I now treasure these memories and whenever I hear a parakeet I remember what they looked like and their distinctive green flashes of colour. It is often a painful memory, an acknowledgement of what I have lost.
We take our son out to the park with his bike and me in my wheelchair with an extra wheel attachment on the front that gives me better mobility over uneven terrain. I listen for the birds and the other people enjoying the views over the city from Blythe Hill Fields. I remember that view and it is something I can just about still conjure up in my mind’s eye. I wonder how long these images will stay with me and it fills me with sadness sometimes. I reflect on the fact that I cannot rely on these memories to be there forever. I find it a comfort to visit Greenwich Park, Dulwich Park and The Horniman Museum Gardens as I remember them so well.
Much of my connection with nature now is linked to memory and it surprises me what pops up when I am outside. For example, when we were spotting birds with my son recently I remembered the detailed drawings I used to do in primary school, copying images of birds from books both at school and home. That link was unexpected. It made me feel a little unsettled and sad that the artistic part of my life is no longer possible.
When I first lost my sight I listened to a lot of podcasts about the blind community and remember hearing Peter White talking on the BBC about his resistance to travel and the idea of holidays in general. He said something like ‘why go to all that effort to go away on holiday where everything is different when I can be completely independent at home where everything is familiar?’ and I related to that so closely. It is a comfort to be around your own things.
Over time though, I read the stories of other blind people, such as Amar Latif who is totally blind and loves to travel. He has set up his own travel agency, TravelEyes (www.traveleyes-international.com) to encourage other blind people to be more adventurous. I am not someone who shies away from a challenge and so over the years I have said yes to daunting opportunities and enjoyed some wonderful holidays in Italy and Sweden and loved their different landscapes. I experience them in a different way now.
As I have no light perception, I feel that I am living in my own imagination these days. I was always a highly visual person and now when I think of those trips I have a fully formed picture in my head of what I imagine the hotel to be like - formed from asking my husband questions, my own memory of what the country is like from remembered photographs and from the physical act of being there. The sand between my feet, the freedom of swimming in the water, the food we ate and people we met all contribute. I have found that holidays are important to me still and feel that new experiences enrich all our lives, no matter if you are disabled or not.
Being out in nature gives us all a boost and we felt this keenly over the first lockdown in March. We valued our little garden so much more and were incredibly grateful that we had made the decision in September last year to have it landscaped, with built in seating and raised beds to make gardening easier for me. The garden was bare at the beginning of the year and over lockdown we enjoyed planting seeds as a family and watching them grow. I would regularly feel the progress of the little shoots that were sprouting into life and by the end of the summer we had seven sunflowers, a wild flower patch, a small herb garden, handfuls of strawberries and more potatoes than we could eat.
Not everything worked, the tomatoes failed along with some green beans and carrots. The experience of creating this little garden was a wonderful thing to have over lockdown. It even served as a home schooling project for my son. Sitting outside in the summer eating our dinner in this quiet space was a treat and I could hear the birds much more prominently as there was so little traffic and no aeroplanes overhead.
For me, the experience of being in nature is always enriched by people giving me descriptions of what is happening around me, the types of flowers, any birds, squirrels or butterflies. There are also times when being out in nature can make me turn inwards and disengage with the world. I put my headphones on and listen to an audiobook or scroll Twitter as the idea of trying to imagine what is going on around me can be overwhelming and exhausting.
In contrast, there are times when I love the experience, such as when we visited the Pinetum in Kent this summer. My sense of smell is damaged so it was a lovely surprise to smell the pine trees so clearly. We visited on a beautiful sunny day and being in amongst the trees in the shade was the best place to be. The paths were easy to negotiate in the wheelchair, which was great, and it had taken quite some time to research a place for us to visit that would have parking that we could book ahead and was accessible by wheelchair. Several places I liked the sound of had to be discounted and this was partly because of social distancing rules and partly because online information about the local area including parking was patchy and incomplete. It was not worth us turning up without a plan only to find we could not park or the paths were not suitable for a wheelchair. Certainly my access to natural spaces can be restricted due to bad online communication from local councils and other local organisations.
Another way that I am able to feel connected to landscapes is through reading fiction. I read Spring by Ali Smith earlier in the year and very much enjoyed her evocative descriptions of our world. There are some brilliant passages about how life is always moving on and Spring cannot be stopped, and I love that idea. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell also has some wonderful, vivid sensory sequences that describe a traditional herb garden and the medicinal uses of herbs in Shakespearian times.
I can see a time when technology will be able to enhance my connection to landscapes, getting information from apps on my phone or by using specialised tech like Aira (www.aira.io). This is a headset with a camera that is connected to a person who is trained to describe whatever a blind person needs assistance with through an earpiece. I long for the day when I can go out with my family and let them run off and leave me with an Aira agent talking in my ear, audio describing the family football match on the beach or telling me what the features of the forest are around me such as types of trees, the light coming through the canopies or any interesting things my son is getting up to. This technology exists but has only just come to the UK in a very expensive form at the moment but I am hopeful that it will be something I can try out in the near future.
I firmly believe that technological advances will unlock the landscapes of nature for the disabled community in future, especially for blind and partially sighted people.
