Where to be

I couldn't be in a tower block sat on concrete. I couldn't be in a room whose windows faced only onto other houses. I couldn't be against a smooth, monochrome wall. 

I could be alone in a bothy or a sheiling, surrounded by conifers. I could be in a huge crumbling Victorian villa. I could live behind an overgrown garden. I could lie in thickets of bramble and blackthorn. I could be in a pillbox at night, listening to badgers. 

I could be in the smallest copse surrounded by nothing but wheat or barley. 

I couldn't be in the park surrounded by metroland homes.  

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I feel guilty for being so self-centred in these first posts. Realising that I'm not special, that I probably won't amount to anything, no matter how much I try, hit hard. However, it was also liberating. I could be anyone and do anything and it wouldn't matter. A night cleaner, or a kitchen porter. Someone who does the washing up. What is important is not what I do, but where I do it. The where has several important criteria. It must be rural. I must be able to walk out of wherever it is, and be in the countryside right away. I must be able to get away from people - all people. Their noise, their infrastructure (insofar as this is possible). Saying that, there are acceptable cultural artefacts. 

I could be looking up at a telegraph pole dressed in ivy. I could sit inside the shell of an abandoned house watching leaves through glassless windows catch sunlight. 

The point is that they are relics. Things that eyes slide off. Things that go unnoticed. 

It seems to me that I can be around humans for only so long before I start to crave their absence. Once I would have said I was a misanthrope. While cynical, I don't think this is true. I'm an introvert, for sure. Social interactions exhaust me, and often make me bored; but there are people whose company I will always welcome. On the other hand, I never tire of nature. It doesn't ask, or require input. It can be observed. It doesn't exhaust. It gives freely to the eyes. 

What right do you have, asks my mind. You are nothing. You've not suffered, not truly. What right do you have to take up bandwidth, to waste people's time writing navel-gazing nothings. You are a nothing, and you are completely unimportant. 

Where to be is important. In my last post I examined how depression only become obvious when I was outside. It can still be a struggle, reconciling this heaviness with a love of nature. What I have noticed is that there are certain places that the depression seems immune to. Inner city parks and woods seem to help none. Perhaps it's because I can sense the city outside, and imagine the people and their activity going on around me. You would expect, therefore, that the flat bleakness of far-north-east Scotland would be exhilarating and redemptive. But something about that landscape didn't help either, and I think it is to do with openness. Hilly landscapes have a degree of closure. You can find valleys or streams with banks. The lees and scarps offer shelter and cover. On the flat moor, you can be seen and see. The landscape is just too open. 

These landscape types result in a very visceral response. Depression is not just mental. Physical manifestations include headaches, nausea, flu-like symptoms, and, of course, that general heaviness described in my last post. And so, perhaps the mind is not really like an estuary after all. If landscape can affect mind at its most vulnerable, there must be something open at all times. Perhaps the outside always has a way of getting in.