Serenity in the Garden

Photo by Corbyrobert - Garden of the Gods     Have you heard of  'Solastalgia' ? A big word for a simple idea. Nikki Taylor sculpture  Solastalgia is "A pain or discomfort caused by the present state of one’s home environment".    It is an emotional suffering felt by different people in different locations as the degradation of the environment continues. It affects indigenous people and urban / industrial denizens alike. “Solastalgia” has been used to describe the experiences of Inuit communities coping with the effects of rising temperatures, refugees from Katrina, Bangladeshi farmers in a drought stricken land.      Solastalgia is also what we feel when we become disconnected from our natural environment..... In 2010 The New York Times published a great article on the term term by Daniel B. Smith (he holds the Critchlow Chair in English at the College of New Rochelle).  I took ...

Relax and Breathe deeply Would you like to make your garden a place for Yoga Practice? Check out this article on Making a Yoga Garden -   Click Here.  we all love rounded forms - they relax us.

The far-seeing media critic Marshall McLuhan famously suggested  that people deciding whether to buy a book should turn to page 69, read what's on it, and then make up their minds. It's a great technique  and the results are pretty good. There is even a blog dedicated to it:   the page 69 test .  So, of course, I applied this test to my book, 'Heaven is a Garden - Designing Serene Outdoor Spaces for  Inspiration  and  Reflection' .  Here are the photos and a paragraph from page 69: Cascades and Traveling Streams Streams and small cascades often are centerpieces of a serene garden. The sound of water tripping over rocks and the sparkle of the sun off a moving eddy calms us and makes us a little more contemplative.  Ralph Waldo Emerson describes this in his book Nature: “Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour, and is not reminded of the flux of all things?”