A stimulating, nurturing environment is a necessity

A Report from the Health Research Board, detailing drug-related deaths and deaths among drug users in Ireland, arrived at Library Headquarters on Monday morning. The report makes sad reading. It details the deaths of over 3,000 people, in the last decade, due to poisoning or trauma.
In the same post, another publication arrived which featured a work by the Spanish artist Carmen Calvo. Calvo has been written about in the following way:
"Artists, you can't help but notice, have more interesting gardens than the rest of us. That's because they're so suffused with talent, everything they touch blossoms into self-expression.
Isn't that what, in our heart of hearts, we all believe?
And isn't it a demoralizing thought? "
Well, it's also dead wrong, says Maria del Carmen Calvo, a painter who keeps a garden in Capistrano.
"Artists don't live in beautiful spaces because they are artists," says Calvo. "They live in beautiful spaces so that they can be artists."
They believe that a stimulating, nurturing environment is a necessity, not a luxury, and they go to great lengths to create it. "Beauty feeds our souls," she continues. "We need it in order to function at full capacity" And that "we," insists Calvo, includes all of us...(Read more)

Perhaps the key point here is that “a stimulating, nurturing environment is a necessity, not a luxury.”

I notice that one of the objectives of the Health Research Board is “to assist in identifying and prioritising areas for intervention and prevention, and to measure the effects of such interventions.”

People take drugs because they are searching for something, because they need something for their heads. Literacy skills and access to books and reading in a stimulating, nurturing environment like a library will do something for people’s heads, will allow people to dream real dreams.
Let’s hope that the Health Research Board will identify and prioritise library services as a place which will provide the stimulating, nurturing environment which vulnerable people need.

“Beauty feeds our souls,” but, we might ask, how many of the people on the Health Research Board list who have died, how many of them were given the opportunity to access the beauty which might have fed their souls.