In the gather section, I carefully chose four elements that all overlapped and willingly invited many more separate elements into them. Most importantly all involved being out in nature. They were foraging, birdwatching, walking, and fishing.

The fishing is on hold until the beginning of the trout season in March 2023, the others are all starting to take shape.  

Date 27.06.2022; After buying myself some good binoculars this activity has certainly made me get outside much more. As somebody who is always looking to see what is flying around, I’ve embraced this challenge. The first month or so was always going to be when a lot of birds would be added to the list. I’ve been doing large sweeps of the countryside where I know I will find certain birds adding these to the list then I will start and target certain areas where I would expect other birds to be found.

My time spent in nature has certainly increased and having to also do a little research on a few of the birds I’m not too sure about. I even found myself sitting against a wall just watching the world go by on a Saturday afternoon surrounded by nothing but the rolling countryside, looking to see what was flying around, another time I was sitting in the woodland doing the same. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve allowed myself the time to do nothing but sit and watch and I’m enjoying it.  

When I’m out birdwatching, I’m at plus 10 on the SUE Scale, so for a time, my mental health is getting quality time. It’s too early to understand how this and the other activities will affect my mental health in the long term but I’m at least incorporating this activity into my routine.

Date 25.08.2022; The bird list continues to grow, albeit slower but it’s now getting more interesting spotting those more elusive birds.

Date 27.06.2022; This activity is another one of great interest to me. Being somebody who likes to be out walking when most people are still in bed, I consider a road busy if I see three cars on it, I once even saw five, can you believe it.

Going out walking at 4 am and doing a long road walk is pretty much the same as walking through woodland or fields, the wildlife you see from the roads at this time of day in summer is incredible. The light mornings are such a joy to be out in, on the SUE Scale my mental health is +10. Even in winter with the dark mornings I still find going out walking at the same time at 4 am amazing, I’m always looking up at the sky just in case I see something out of the ordinary.

With the additional landscapes I've added into my walks, I’ve started walking further and changing my routes. The result is I’m getting to see more species of birds, foraging a little as I walk and noting places, I will fish next year.

Date 29.06.2022; June and July are not the greatest months to forage so I have been back to my mushroom books preparing the ground to ready for the fast-approaching season. Learning about mushrooms makes me want to do nothing but go and look for them. I’ve found a few puffballs and oyster mushrooms in June but even just researching them is getting me looking at the weather forecast for when it’s going to rain on the off chance that we see some early fruiting this year.  

SWOC is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Challenges. Here this is used as a tool to focus on the key areas of the design.

Strengths

A strength of this design is the quality and diversity of the research that has been put into it. Without this level of research, I feel that I would not have been able to reflect on what I was trying to aim for with the design.  My design aim was “To find ways to improve my mental health that can be incorporated into my life.” Throughout these past five years working on this design, I’ve had a lot of time to experience many different states of mind. My research has varied depending on my thought process each leading to different areas of research. Added all together, through personal experience and learning I’ve been able to work through difficult periods and now I have a greater understanding of certain triggers to watch out for and react to them to help prevent my mental health from moving in a direction I’d rather not travel. It has only been possible to discover the outcome of this design by going deep into my thoughts and experiences, at times I got lost in the research and would start again with another subject, but this proved to strengthen the foundation of the design.  

The key to all of this was the daily notes I had been taking even before I started this design. Adding the SUE sales in 2018 improved my notetaking but I never included this in the research section of the design because it was just something I was routinely doing each day. It was only when I came to the maintenance section of the Gather stage of the design did its importance come to light. Having access to over six years of past notetaking has enabled me to look for patterns in the data.

The greatest strength of the design is how the obvious has been pointed out to me. It is nature that brings me the most joy in my life. In the observe section I had mapped out the different areas of interest to me around the town and all of these pointed towards the same thing, that of the natural world. It was only through the process of each section of the design that the same patterns kept showing up which helped make me realise the things I need to be doing to improve my mental health.

Weaknesses

I’m having to think about this question, it presents itself as an oxymoron, the weaknesses of this design have become the challenges which have become the opportunities that have then become the strengths of the design.

If I was to pick out weaknesses, I would say that it took me over five years to finish. It would have been great to have stopped everything and just worked on this design but at the times when I was going through more challenging mental health periods, as a consequence, I lost track of any direction.

Opportunities

With the realisation of where most of my joy comes from, I’m now able to add greater value to certain things. This is reflected in the four activities chosen to add the most value in helping me keep on improving my mental health. It’s also the simplicity of these activities and how they all relate to each other or can blend to form one activity. I avoided giving myself challenges that I would have to go out of my way to do, instead, I’ve focused on the things I’m already doing or have been trying to find the time to do and building upon each to allow them to become the focus of my life.

On a lighter tone, I of course have an excellent opportunity to get to observe many more birds, eat wonderful wild foods, fish in the beauty of the river swale and improve my physical fitness.   

Challenges

Over these past years of research working on this design, I’ve experienced many different emotions and thoughts. Often, I was blindly following the direction my thoughts and research were taking me. I was taking course after course in the belief that they would lead me somewhere. For many years I was just consuming information but as the proverb says, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

I’m probably not the king yet but my eyes have been opened many times and I’m still inspired to keep on learning and improving my mental health.

I may not know what future challenges will come into my life or how they could affect my mental health but seeing this design through to the end has clearly shown me challenges can be overcome.

Conclusion

This has been a very important design helping me put a framework around my thoughts. It is a design I’ve abandoned many times due to its complexity in how I could present it in my diploma. At the same time, it is a design that has needed to be completed. I have enjoyed working through the final attempt at presenting the design as you read it now, most of all it is the permaculture design that has added the most value to my life.

In closing, I have a good feeling about this design, a feeling I’m not able to put into words but I know it is going to grow in directions I never expected.