Partial Sun Newsletter: Volume 2

I planted five palm tree seedlings today. At first, a plant feels like a person who’s been transplanted to a different country. It takes a while to adapt to the way other people live. Plants are like that, too.

–Roberto Burle Marx

HEAL ME WITH PLANTS

What: This NY Times article is particularly personal for me. It’s a piece that came out about a year ago, and six months before I started interning at NYU Langone hospital’s Horticultural Therapy department. Author Ellie Shechet provides a deeper look, a workday in the life of a Horticultural Therapist. Here, the value of plants and the natural world are illuminated. A plant can be a great aesthetic asset in someone’s living room. But in a hospital, for a patient, plants can provide much more – distraction from pain, a spark that triggers a memory, a sense of control, an opportunity to feel the earth through your fingers again.

Check out: The therapy bunnies, Lily and Clovis, who, like the shelves of plants ready to make their rounds, have made their home at the hospital, too.

“There’s nothing more happily out of place in a hospital than something green and delicate and alive. And in a setting where patients routinely feel poked and prodded, isolated and immobile, that act of nurturing a plant can be a transportive part of the recovery process.”

Some Monstera and the shadow of my head at George Nakashima House, Studio and Workshop in New Hope, Pennsylvania.

SILENCE AND THE PRESENCE OF EVERYTHING

What: Is there anything more that even needs to be said after hearing “I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being.” You already know you’ll be fully absorbed in this interview, five minutes in, seeing the world through a completely different lens.

Check out: This interview with Acoustic Ecologist Gordon Hempton. It’s a different take on the age-old question, “if a tree falls and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” Over the course of thirty years, Hempton has collected hundreds of recorded sounds from all over the world, catalogued and organized into digital folders. But what he’s on the hunt for – the absence of noise, or, “the Last Quiet Place” – is something you could actually consider a practically extinct species in itself. For Hempton, quiet, truly quiet, places should be thought of as something as important to our wellbeing as clean water and unpolluted air. Here’s an excerpt from the episode’s transcript, Hempton speaking:

“Oh, yeah. It’s not the absence of sound. I think a physicist will tell you that true silence does not exist, not on planet Earth with an atmosphere and oceans. When I speak of silence, I often use it synonymously with quiet. I mean silence from modern life, silence from all these sounds that have nothing to do with the natural acoustic system, which is busy communicating. Wildlife are as busy communicating as we are, but it’s not just messages coming from wildlife. I can name some that have been really transformative in my personal life. But it’s also the experience of place, what it means to be in a place.”