Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses.
photo essay: Chesapeake Native Plant Gardens: September (Nuts for Natives). “Most native plants will withstand drought but can look pretty terrible in the process. This is really the time to take a look around to figure out which plants can withstand the dryness and heat.”
images: Art Delivery: Sean William Randall (The Jealous Curator). The light! Here’s how this Canadian artist describes his painting (acrylic on canvas) non-visually: “The smell of rain evaporating off of soil and leaves on a warm day, with the gentle sound of a slow stream nearby.” (On his website, I loved Just Another World.)
essay: Unhappy medium: The region-beta paradox (Haley Nahman/Maybe, Baby). Vapid name for an extremely important idea, that only when things get bad enough do we often find motivation to change our circumstances. Being worse off can mobilize us to take action to address our problems, while experiencing only minor annoyance or irritation tends to lead to stagnancy: “in matters of indecision, action is almost always better than inaction, because it will thrust you out of the middle and into the margins where, positive or negative, you’ll have a lot more to work with.” Great example: “When things are medium-bad, … people are full of immobilizing qualifications: gratitude, perspective, acknowledgments that things could be worse. These considerations are useful for putting one’s situations in context — and for generally not being a miserable, histrionic person — but they’re useless at helping one make decisions. Gratitude for food never helped me pick what to have for dinner. Sometimes, it’s just irrelevant.”
how-to: Animated Knots. Via Lev Parikian’s recent Six Things (5th item), in which he writes my thoughts: This promises to be one of those resources that I say I will look at for five minutes every day … and then basically completely ignore.” Knots for boating, fishing, climbing, search & rescue, arborists, household, scouting, horse & farm …
essay: Hotel Bars (Rosecrans Baldwin/Meditations in an Emergency). “…the reality and the imagined, anonymity meets intimacy, a sense of dislocation in a very specific place.” One of my favourite heterotopias.
