In the weeks after my daughter returned home from an inpatient mental health treatment early this year, she and I spent a lot of time by the stream that curls through my apartment complex. There, she began to rediscover some of the simple joys she once loved as a curious, carefree child. We turned over rocks in a stream to see the life in miniature living beneath, pulled up some wild onion grasses, and took samples of everything back home to look at under a microscope.
There was something essential in these mental health awareness activities, in the science, the learning, the wonder, and in the grounding of her and me together. There was something profoundly human about reveling in the everyday parts of nature that we come to overlook when our lives get too complicated and hurried. Here are other May mental health awareness month activities you can try