By Grace Hill
Across June The Wildlife Trusts have been getting people involved and engaged in nature for 30 Days Wild. Grace shares her thoughts on exploring nature with sight loss.
Hello, I’m Grace and I’m a VICTA Changemaker, and today I’m going to offer some insight into my experience of nature as a blind person. So we often talk about how nature can help our mental health, how going out in nature can help us clear our heads and connect with the world around us. And that is completely true, but there are downsides…
There are parts of nature that we comment on, for example, on how they look, how pretty that butterfly is, how majestic that animal is, that’s walking through the landscape, for example. And that can be really, really isolating when you can’t see it and you can’t actually reach out, for example, to touch the pretty thing that people are talking about. It can really make you feel locked in your own world, in a way.
But the flipside to that is that you can experience the other sensory benefits of nature, and that they really are things that can clear your head and can help you with your mental health. I know I have a really beautiful couple of local walks near to me, which are gorgeous places to go to, to clear your head in this world where things can just feel so negative and too much. Because they’re just beautiful, beautiful places to be and they feel so removed from the human world.
Even though you are in it and you’re with other people and you are connected. So I really, really hope this helps encourage people to get out into nature, even if you can’t see how beautiful something is, it might have a beautiful energy around it, a beautiful aura, and that is really what makes it special.
Do you enjoy a favourite outdoor space that helps your mental health? Let us know in the comments!
Find out more about The Wildlife Trusts and find your local nature reserve at: wildlifetrusts.org
