When you become a parent sometimes it is hard to find peace. Maybe you never knew what peace meant to you until you became a parent and sometimes you yearn for it, for yourself and your family? New Year is a great time for reflection and to think about what you would like for 2020. Perhaps you would like more peace in your life for you and your family?

When I first sat down to write this volunteer guest blog I had ‘crept’ away at what I thought was a good opportunity to type up what I had handwritten. A lot of distraction from fantasizing on air b&b for a summer holiday and I found that my MIL had knocked to come in to thank me for the fridge magnets I had given her for Christmas. After our chat she left and said she couldn’t find my youngest in the flat, she hoped he hadn’t gone down the road by himself or something (he is five). So needless to say my carefully sought opportunity for peace didn’t materialize as I hoped.

However, I do know that if we look for peace as we go about our busy lives it does usually unfold and manifest itself. I feel that sometimes just looking out the window and finding a few things to gaze at and marvel at helps me find peace. Whether it is the number of leaves on a tree, or the flight of birds. Before I had children I could make time for peace and choose when to have it in my day. Now, with a feeling of constant I try to weave it in to what I do as I do it.

Sometimes we need to carry this feeling of ‘looking out the window’ with us as we go for instance just making it to the shops and back with little ones in tow.

Here are a few peace gardens in the area you may pass that will give you time and space as you make the journeys, not just reach the destinations.

World Peace Garden: “If not now, then when?” Its website says. A great quote for the New Year too. A small but significant sloped patch next to Hampstead Heath overground. Full of opportunities and prompts for peace, wind chimes included.
Flower trail outside Royal Free Hospital Pond Street. Created from an important but littered bit of land, volunteers have transformed even the darkest shadiest bits at the bottom with ferns to wild and bright flowers at the top, with cut tree trunk stepping stones for small and big feet alike.

At the top is an extra peace patch for praying for Nazanin to come home, West Hampstead Mum who has been imprisoned in Iran for close to 1500 days. Please let 2020 be the year she returns to her family.

I am hoping to create a peace garden on Broadhurst Gardens (more South Hampstead) on a similar area of overlooked littered land. We have a Broadhurst Greening Group and we are waiting for the go ahead from Camden. I have been in communication with the Council since Nazanin was first imprisoned and when she comes home I hope she will open it with her family. It will be a wild flower verge and planters to walk through and past to plant and to harvest tiny bits from as you go to and from the playground there.

Here’s hoping for peace and lots of opportunities for it to present itself for enlightened practice in our busy lives. In a time that I write it, when Hampstead Village has been targeted by anti-Semitic graffiti the time for peace I hope is now.

Where will you add greenery and peace to your area? Where do you hope to find more peace in Hampstead?

Katie Gosling

Peace Gardens in Hampstead