So I was asked the other day what it was that inspired me to first take on Seear’s Park Nursery and how did I come up with Yourspace Sutton and the truth is that there is no definitive answer I could give you in short that would serve as being totally accurate.
Somewhere deep inside I always knew I wanted to do something different, to break out from the scripted routine and to get to a stage in my life where I got to savour the taste from what I was at long last harvesting, knowing it had come from the seeds that I myself had painstakingly taken time to once plant and to gradually germinate.
In actual fact I just really never cared too much about the idea of trying to conform if it meant that work and routine suppressed the time and space to be able to think at length and to daydream.
I guess I kind of believe that people should find time or make time to think more and to dream more, even if it means doing less to find the time for it, and I know that sounds like it’s counter-productive or even a procrastinators point of view, but I firmly believe something different.
Seasons and years constantly pass us by all the time and we are all swept along all with the rushing and the having to react all the time to what pressures life or work throw at us all the time that we end up living just doing what we have to without living with any of our own planning.
Instinctively the thing that I can cope with the least, is the feeling like maybe I’m suffocating because I can’t find the time to think deeply or to reflect, or just the luxury to allow myself to regularly daydream.
I think perhaps maybe that’s a key attribute in the eventual nurturing of Yourspace Sutton.
Despite all of the above, on this occasion that is not the answer I gave when I was asked about how did Yourspace start and instead I told them about my favourite children’s short story while I was growing up, and how even so young it really resonated with me always. That book was Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Selfish Giant’.
In short it is about a Giant who goes through a complete character arc, firstly angrily chasing off children who dared climb into and play in his large extensive garden and who builds a high wall all the way round it to keep them out but subsequently experiences only years of continued winter in his garden despite how much he longs for spring. He eventually learns the lesson when once day children breach a hole in the wall and bring spring to the corner of his garden where they are playing.
In my own being I have always noticed the best things about most things in life is not any one experience alone, but when we connect with others about it.
When you’ve read a good book you always take even more pleasure when someone else has read it too or if you are able to lend it to someone knowing you will be able to talk about the story, characters and experience etc. If you watch a good film that you end up loving, the greatest reward is when you discover someone else who shares that very same feeling and you can spend hours talking about trivial things as much as about all its intricacies, and the same can be said of most things be it music, travelling, eating or anything. The real passion you feel comes from the connecting and sharing and as such anything we deem to be good in life brings us happiness but not just because we have known it ourselves but because we have been able to continuously share it.
You reap what you sow and it comes back to you in the harvest. It’s worth thinking about what it is in life that you spend the most time nurturing and the seeds that you sow around you determine what comes up in the end right beside you.
I think I was immediately attracted by the long term history of the Seears Park Nursery site and it’s locked away status from the main public domain even though it stood in a park that was left to the local people in perpetuity and in the hundred years that followed most people that lived in the locality or frequently used the public park, still knew almost nothing of it.
I had previously worked at other gardening projects that were exclusively behind locked gates and barriers mainly because of safeguarding issues or because of the nature of the service user and the one thing I missed the most about all of those experiences was that I never got to share any achievement, successes or even day to day struggles with anyone outside of that immediate circle and so the connecting with personal passions was something that felt often stifled. From the first day I got the keys for the nursery space, I knew right then that my mission was to open it up and make it inclusive of those that had always existed on the other side of the locked nursery gates but to some degree that wasn’t just about making it inclusive, but just as much about me being selfish and meeting my own needs.
I’ve always needed to feed of the sharing of experiences and so the sharing of Yourspace was also just about the feeding of me. The feeding of mind and of spirit and the sowing of seeds of listening to me, but I only was able to listen because I insisted on being allowed to think long and hard and to let myself daydream rather than react constantly to the demands of someone else’s set out routines.
Who knows what influences us in any way or the forces that come together to help us come to any decision but it is important that we take a moment regularly to listen to our thoughts if we are going to one day harvest the fruits of our own choices instead of being force fed the seeds from rushed and reactive routine.
If my Yourspacesutton journey does indeed have any roots in that childhood book then perhaps I like the idea that it might also share pages with another picture book and wordless story. Last year someone discovering Yourspacesutton and the journey it had embarked on, commented to me how it reminds them about their own favourite children’s book and they introduced me to Jeannie Baker’s wonderful book just simply called ‘Belonging’.
Belonging is a story told in pictures across its pages of the changing view over time but from looking out always from the same window.
A bleak cold grey city street gradually becomes a place people can make home. Step by step as the baby in the window grows she is seen looking out at the view and she and her neighbours begin the process of reviving the fortunes of their neighbourhood. Over time children and adults green up the place planting trees and bushes in the empty derelict spaces. Murals are painted over old graffiti, cars are stopped from racing through in a rush, tall fences keeping the neighbour pushed away slowly come down and everything starts to blossom.
Jeannie Baker on her website puts it this way:
‘Belonging’ explores the re-greening of the city: the role of community, the empowerment of people and the significance of children, family and neighbourhood in changing their urban environment . The streets gradually become places for safe children’s play, and community activity and places for nature and wonder.’
I love that all that can be portrayed in just pictures and the power of thought. I also love that someone has personally compared yourspacesutton as making that kind of impact and journey and it leads me further to this concluding thought; take time to listen to your thoughts and to your daydreams and whatever you do in this life, make some time to be pro-active to your own thoughts not just constantly reactive to every one else’s, and then you can really take passion from all the things you end up connecting on and sharing.
