Cybercity-sunrise - It's A Beautiful Day At The End Of The World

WAIT. Not to be controversial but. What if I just enjoy life for what it is right now instead of stressing about what I’ve yet to get out of it. What if I choose to enjoy this time……I know that once it goes, I won’t get it back from anywhere

BIG SILLY?

HUGE NEWS!!! The Rethinking Lawns project of @chicagobotanic @ChicagoParks @UMFlint just received the PACSP grant from @NSF & @PGAFamilyFdn to support our research into lawn enhancement & replacement with native plants. PIs:

@BeckSamBar @BeckyTonietto @lglyndal @chase_prairie (that's me!)

Turf lawns are omnipresent landscapes in urban settings. While they are more beneficial than impervious surfaces, our research project asks the question: what could our lawns become?

Coming from backgrounds in prairie restoration and urban native plants, we are proposing that incorporating short native plants into lawn greenspaces can produce concrete benefits for people and our more-than-human neighbors.

We are quantifying the benefits of our native plants in these settings, putting numbers to the theoretical benefits documented in the literature. We are measuring wildlife support, stormwater infiltration, cooling effect, and soil carbon storage.

To learn more, check out our website with official press releases and links and goodies!

Rethinking Lawns

NSF Grant Announced!

The National Science Foundation and Paul G. Allen Family Foundation have announced a $1.76 million grant to study the effects of converting

It's not unsurprising imo due to the eroticism inherent to religious devotion. There's a rich tradition of nuns being horny for Jesus in a serious way. For people of a romantic persuasion, a relationship with god parallels and sometimes exceeds earthly relationships, and I think art about one kind can speak to either.

the lana del rey coquette girlies wanting to become nuns is the most incomprehensible thing to me. like what do they think being a nun means? you know the only sugar daddy most of them have is jesus right?

“To speak of attention in this manner, as a patient waiting on the world to disclose itself, recalls how Simone Weil insisted that attention is a form of active passivity. “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,” she insisted, “but by waiting for them.”3 This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation with the object known, particularly insofar as affection may be one of its consequences.4 After all, attention can also be understood simply as the name for the contact the mind makes with the world, and, if it is sufficiently attenuated, our capacity and inclination to care, desire, love, and act also suffer. This, too, is one of the concerns animating Bennett’s explorations of enchantment. “You have to love life before you can care about anything,” she writes. “One must be enamored with existence and occasionally even enchanted in the face of it,” she adds, “in order to be capable of donating some of one’s scarce mortal resources to the service of others.” In her view, the story we’ve been told about disenchantment already conditions us against the attention that we must necessarily bring to the world in order to perceive its enchanted quality. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think more than the story of disenchantment is at work here, but she is right to observe that we are trapped in a vicious circle. Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate. And this experience in turn reinforces the disinclination to attend to the world with appropriate patience and care. Looking and failing to see, we mistakenly conclude there was nothing to see. What is there to do, then, except to look again, and with care, almost as a matter of faith, although a faith encouraged by each fleeting encounter with beauty we have been graced to experience. To stare awkwardly at things in the world until they cease to be mere things. To risk the appearance of foolishness by being prepared to believe that world might yet be enchanted. Or, better yet, to play with the notion that we might cast our attention into the world in the spirit of casting a spell. We may very well conjure up surprising depths of experience, awaken long dormant desires, and rekindle our wonder in the process. What that will avail, only time would tell.”

— If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You’re Not Paying Attention