SEAWEED & LICHEN

SEEDS

Thinking about ways we can transform our relationship to space. A few days ago I chanced upon a radio interview with Veronica Valk, an architect/urban designer from Estonia. Her ideas highlight the relationship between space and the human psyche and her 'Seeds in the shoes project' is a simple yet beautiful idea based on this. About half the population of the Estonian Capital suffer from SAD (seasonally adjusted disorder) and Veronica's 'Seeds' project playfully seeks to brighten the mood. Think of this - shoes that people walk in releasing seeds as they travel through urban spaces.

EVERYDAY OBJECTS ...

Toilet paper rolls transformed into paper forests by artist Yuken Teruya. Beautiful and inspiring!

(via lushlee)

SMALL TREASURES

For the most part I grew up in St Andrews, about an hours drive north-east from Melbourne’s city. I spent much of my childhood climbing trees, creating pathways through tea tree thickets, swimming in dam & creek waterholes, picking blackberries & jonquils at the burnt out spot where a house once stood, hunting through the undergrowth for Easter eggs, sliding down an eroded gully in high rain. It was a twenty-acre playground with rusty wire fences and pathways to neighbouring land. Growing into teenage years saw a shift to laying in paddocks reading books while my loping dog chased rabbits or trying to muster the same level of bravery as my sister to ride the cross country trails we had forged through bush. Later still I moved out of home and felt the magnetic pull on my heart to go home - in part to see my family, in part to hear the night sounds of frogs in the gully, the woosh of a wood duck landing on water, the woop of an owl. To look out the windows and see tall barky gums, wrens bobbing for insects, dappled light as it fell through the trees. I started to learn new names for things and regard more the injustice of weeds marching steadily forth, colonisers mirroring a history we cannot undo. I walked through dry scrub and found a new appreciation for my fathers reasoning to keep a part fenced from horses – orchids, delicate and unimaginable to me in my childish and dreamy adventures through the bush. But there they were, small treasures.

Later still I notice the magnetic pull receding, that part of my heart taken up with new life. I also noticed something else.

Driving out to my old stomping ground I feel myself sinking. I see the thinning of the undergrowth, fallen branches, shrivelling, parched land. I can hear the crackling of leaves under foot before I step from the car. Black Saturday is in my recent memory. Sometimes returning to the city is now a relief - a buffer from the reality of how frighteningly fast climate is changing. I have known this land for thirty-three years. There was always the need for timely showers and summers where only a water truck could replenish our tanks. And yet I remember the rain that filled the creek to overflowing and the ferns that grew like small forests beside it. A heart remembers the childish joy of running under sprinklers, of wading through overflow water from the dam.

It is my ultimate hope that we are brave enough, smart enough, selfless enough to change.