Affordances

Affordances have many components communications, aesthetics, spiritually, connections, morality and health. Christiansen & Baum (1997) stated that affordance is ‘anything which the environment can offer the individual which is relevant to the role challenge and can facilitate role competence’. It is the person’s perception of the environment, along with their effectiveness to produce competence’. As cited in Hagedorn (2000). I will look at spiritually and connections;

Working in the garden gives me a sense of spirit and gives me mind organising time and the fact that my garden gets tidied gives me feedback and reinforces my feelings of well-being. So in a way I conditioned myself by the way I engage in my garden and it affects my human condition, my health and well-being. 

While I’m working in my garden with mindfulness, I gain a sense of connective-ness; connective-ness with mother earth and through this I connection I end up connecting with Grandmother of whom I have never met, she had died many years before I was born. Some year’s back I was planting a lavender garden in the house I then lived owned, my mother was visiting and I was showing her what I was up to with the garden (connecting with her) and that brought back memories for my mother who then informed me that my Grandmother had loved lavenders as well.  So now where ever I live I aim to have lavender in my garden, either as a single bush or a whole garden, to connect spiritually, with the history of the maternal side of my family, my mother, grandmother.

I feel that spiritually is 'in' connective-ness and mindfull-ness; below in a poem that reminds me to be mindfull when in the garden

My garden of Prayer

My garden beautifies my yard

And adds fragrance to the air...

But it is also my cathedral

And my quiet place of prayer...

So little do we realise

That the glory and the power

Of He who made the Universe

Lies hidden in a flower

Helen Steiner Rice

Christiansen, C. & Baum, C. (eds)(1997). Occupational Therapy enabling function and wellbeing. 2nd ed. Slack: New Jersey.

Hagedorn, R. (2000). Tools of practise in Occupational Therapy. A structured approach to core skills and processes. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.  

Steiner Rice, H. (1986) Prayerfully, poems of devotion. London: Hutchinson & Co Ltd.