Tag Archives: landscapes

…still felix? Hardly!

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…my tether?

Four incredible deserts–Nafud, Dahna, Nejd and the Rub al Khali. No weather reports–no GPS–no communications? No way. Still felix?

Our Western image of the Empty Quarter landscape, an image pieced together from the writings of our past, the holy books, the Greeks, the Romans, Marco Polo(1254-1324), Ibn Battuta(1304-1369), the ships docking in Genoa and Venice, the writings of Richard Francis Burton(1821-1890), Gertrude Bell(1868-1926), T.E. Lawrence(1888-1935),  Wilfred Thesiger(1910-2003), and others, continues today–even with GPS, even with 24/7 online large pipe digital coms–to be a mystery…an unknown landscape…still beckoning…still threatening.

Discoverable Portals

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Discover a portal, cross the threshold…unpredictable, unimaginable, indescribable, transcendent…all possible…

I am working through a transition from planning, designing, building and maintaining gardens, landscapes and plants to writing about them.

The above graphic shows how I link past experiences with my stories. I describe it in a little more detail here.

In the next months, I plan to select landscape, garden and plant images from my past decades of work in North Africa and the Middle East to demonstrate what it is that inspires me to write.

Your City and…Gezi Park

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Isn’t it curious that the loss of a tree in a park, Gezi Park, and rumors of a new shopping center erupted into a huge series of protests in Istanbul?

Not surprising if you ask the question:

How many of us, city dwellers, have safe and easy walks to inspirational gardens and landscapes?

People can only live so long in cities without refreshing and inspirational gardens and landscapes…then they erupt.  People erupt due to a fundamental imbalance in their living conditions.  Fix your city, fix your neighborhood, before the eruption.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEzqu_z9fRo?rel=0&w=560&h=315]