A quiet practice of attention, belonging, and rest in urban parks from Yewande Okuleye, as part of our In Practice series.
During the pandemic my eyes opened to green. I discovered the small parks and scraps of grass near home. I started walking and photographing plants. I learned the shapes of leaves before I learned the day’s headlines. I needed green to keep ‘feeling blue’ at bay. With the roads quiet, birdsong moved to the foreground.
Time drips when I stand.
Tick, tock, lock — no mercy lying down.
[Poetry fragments appear throughout as breath-marks from my walking notes.]
Before that softening, there was fear. I’ve studied the history of medicine and outbreaks; I knew the catalogues of risk and response. I knew about Ebola outbreaks, the 2009 H1N1 ‘swine flu’ pandemic, and avian influenza scares. Still, I carried a misplaced certainty that ‘we’ were safe. An odd confidence I can’t account for now. Then, one morning, a thought stuck like glue: what if this becomes a pandemic? The foreboding didn’t come with evidence I could show; when I shared it, friends and family told me not to be dramatic. As decisions about lockdown were delayed, I felt anxious, commuting between London and Leicester across five modes of transport. The week before the lockdown announcement in March 2020, I told my manager I’d take holiday and stay home. I needed a place to rest from the noise.
Years of reading outbreak chronicles hummed in my head like a tuning fork. It made the present feel both new and familiar: different microbes, same choreography of fear, delay, decree, prayer. When the streets finally emptied and the birds moved to the foreground, I let the green come forward too. What began as survival, staying close, staying alert, turned into a practice of noticing. The city reintroduced itself as leaf, bark, shadow, birdsong. My nervous system took the hint and eased, a little.
The skull bruises inward,
as if something inside
is learning to breathe without space
When restrictions lifted, the habit of staying close remained. My world had shrunk to short routes and safe turns, and I kept them even when I didn’t have to. I told myself it was efficient. Really, it was a body conserving energy after a long emergency. I moved with a carefulness that once served me and now held me back.
Widening the circle
This summer I decided to widen the circle. I picked a park and went. Then I picked another. I didn’t make a programme. I counted gates. Raphael Park first: a quiet lake, trees that do their job without fuss, people walking at the speed of an ordinary day. Then Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park: water threading through big paths, movement everywhere but not the hurried kind. Coronation Park in Leyton: small, close, the size of a weekday. Hyde Park: long sightlines where the breath can travel further than the inbox. A reservoir on the Wandle. And later, the lake at the edge of Epping Forest, where I sat and let my week drain out.
That Friday at Epping had its own weather. I arrived as two bodies: a Monday self in shiny silver armour, and the Thursday version platework flaking, bones exposed to weather, blood at the boil. I sat by the water and stopped trying to manage myself. The surface was an indigo I’d seen in magazines and dismissed as edited. It wasn’t. The wind combed the lake into small yesses. My eyes, jumpy from a week of tabs and tasks, found something gentle to rest on. The change was not dramatic. It was usable. I could be in my body without negotiating with it.
Every heartbeat, a soft hammer
searching for its echo.
Na so body dey talk when pain get sense
but this one no get name yet.
I began to understand the difference between being in nature and connecting with it. Being in nature is about where your body is. Connecting is about how your attention behaves. I learned this by doing small things that didn’t feel like doing. I put a hand on bark and noticed its temperature. I let a ripple lead my gaze to a reed and then to the line of trees. I named what was alive around me: dog, duck, jogger, midges. I tied a thin thread from what I was seeing to a steadying memory. I picked up a piece of litter and put it in the bin. I watched a heron practise patience. None of this required gear. It required staying long enough for effort to soften.
Later I found language for what I was practising in Miles Richardson’s work on nature connectedness: contact, emotion, meaning, compassion, beauty (Richardson & Lumber 2018). Those words aren’t a prescription: they’re reminders. If I make contact skin to bark, fingers in water, the place becomes real, not just scenery. If I name the emotion – relief, ache, quiet – it stops leaking into everything else. If I link what I see to something that matters, the place helps carry the weight. If I take a tiny act of care, I am not saving the world; I am practising belonging. If I notice one precise beauty, the colour shift on the water, the way a coot writes a black line across blue; I remember that attention can be held without force. Small acts, repeated, changed my day. Repeating them over the summer weeks changed my weeks.
What each place taught me
Each place taught me something different. Raphael Park offered unshowy continuity. I sat under a long-armed tree and read a page more slowly than usual, as if the sentences, like the lake, needed time to settle. At the Olympic Park I learned momentum without hurry. I let a running club pass, then fell in behind for a minute, borrowing their rhythm without claiming their pace. Water moved beside me like a quiet instruction: go on, but don’t rush. Coronation Park proved that proximity matters; because it is near, I go often, and because I go often, it works. Hyde Park stretched my thinking; a long view gives thoughts a longer hallway. The Wandle reminded me that the city carries its own rivers if you go looking. Epping gave me stillness I didn’t have to earn. By the end of summer, it was not about how I felt in nature; it was the relationship I was developing with trees. For the first time in years, I appreciated the trees in front of my window that block my view of my favourite building in London, The Shard.
Rest entered the picture too, but in a way I could accept. Tricia Hersey’s idea that rest is resistance has weight indoors; it also belongs outside. Tricia Hersey reminds us that rest is a right, not a reward, and a form of refusal in a culture that equates exhaustion with worth (Hersey 2022) Choosing to slow down in public green space is not a treat saved for when the list is done. It is a small refusal to let productivity own every hour. A bench becomes a pause the city cannot invoice. A loop around a lake measures a day in something other than output. I think of it as public rest, a commons of attention. I don’t often lie on the grass, but I have let a reed bed hold the week for twenty minutes so my nervous system can downshift. That counts. It feels like a surrender to the land. An appreciation for stability and firmness in a world that feels unpredictable and mercurial. In this quiet moment, I wonder how long this land will remain safe and sane.
I kept writing as I walked. Not to produce a poem, but to capture impressions from my breath from the air, the wind, the fallen trees, the still water, running waters, and the sounds. To return these as offerings of gratitude to my teachers I met this summer. As I have learnt that nature is not a backdrop, it is not for our consumption. It does not exist to make us feel better. That is incidental. What we call nature is not of service to us. The trees did not ask to heal me; they asked only that I stay long enough to notice. I knew them not by name but by presence. Rootedness. Quiet magnificence. The unseen roots speaking to one another underfoot.
Contextual note
This piece sits within the frame of creative practice and illness by approaching wellbeing from the threshold rather than the clinic. I focus on preventative health and the subtle terrain we all occupy between well and unwell, especially in a time when many of us are living on that edge. The essay explores nature-connected attention, rest, and creative noticing as practices that support steadiness, belonging, and planetary health. It highlights how creativity, quiet discernment, and time outside can serve as forms of care and how stress recovery can be understood as staying close, paying attention, and learning to soften.
About the author
Dr. Yewande Okuleye is a medical humanities scholar, poet, and researcher exploring how planetary health begins with attention to land, body, and community. Her work bridges somatic practice, cultural memory, and environmental wellbeing, inviting new ways of belonging to the living world.
About In Practice
‘In Practice’, The Polyphony’s creative practice research project, showcases multi-modal creative engagement with the lived experience of chronic illness, disability, caregiving and health from a range of creative practitioners within and beyond academic research. Founded by Aly Fixter and Grace Brimacombe-Rand, they wanted to bring their own creative practice and academic engagement with creative texts to the medical humanities digital community and foster new connections. If you are a creative person who explores their lived experience of health or the body through writing, art, photography or any creative methods, please get in touch to share your work with The Polyphony’s audience.
References
Hersey, Tricia. 2022. Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto. London: Octopus Books.
Richardson, Miles, and Ryan Lumber. 2018. “Pathways to Nature Connectedness: A Focus on Affect.” Ecopsychology 10 (2): 132–140.
Richardson, Miles, Ryan Lumber, David Harvey, Robert A. H. R. Waterman, and P. Brian C. Slater. 2019. “Nature Connectedness and Wellbeing: Examining the Links between Nature Connectedness, Time in Nature, and Life Satisfaction.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 61: 166–173.
