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inspiration
The Art of Doing Nothing by Marlaina Donato
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celebrated its 100th anniversary, grows herbs, vegetables and microgreens in 24 greenhouses, including a microgreen blend with nasturtium and viola flowers. “If you pick the flowers on herbs, the plant will grow better and last longer,” Bell adds. Flowers like wild violets, chive blossoms and common milkweed can add bold color and flavor to vinegar with pinkish purple hues that power up salad dressings. Bell also likes to dry chive flowers to use year-round. “They are a nice purple sprinkle to add to dishes when things are boring in winter,” she says. Marie Viljoen, a New York City forager, chef and author of the cookbook Forage, Harvest, Feast: A Wild-Inspired Cuisine, incorporates numerous wild and cultivated flowers, including tree flowers like magnolia and black locust, into her hyperlocal, seasonal meals. Even common garden roses can add a delicious dimension to dishes and drinks, according to Viljoen. “I like to ferment roses into a simple soda, using organically grown rose petals, honey or sugar and tap water. It’s ready within a few days, or else you can leave to ferment a few months to make a sipping vinegar,” she says. “You can also combine really fragrant rose petals with a neutral honey like clover, then strain after a few days for a rose water essence you can add to yogurt or other dishes.” Viljoen also uses rose petals as edible garnishes for deviled eggs or as edible plates for goat cheese balls on her gourmet picnics. Some flowers are for the eyes only, however. Many can be poisonous, so it’s important to ensure a particular species is edible before digging in. Viljoen also advises carefully distinguishing between poisonous lookalikes when foraging: A delicious daylily and a toxic true lily look similar, but are in different plant families, for example. She also says to look for organically grown flowers that haven’t been sprayed with pesticides.
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ost of us can remember having the glorious ability to do absolutely nothing of practical significance as children. We rolled in the grass, laughed ourselves silly with friends on the street corner and happily squandered away Saturdays. Somewhere along the line, someone planted a seed in our brains that programmed us to believe that we must earn our existence. We became self-conscious perfectionists that equate leisure and “be-ing” with laziness. As adults, we see “non-doing” as something trivial, something forbidden, unless we become ill or injured, and only then can we shrug off the societal guilt trip. Somehow, well-being has become a luxury, and our physical bodies are paying for it. We feel old before our time and suffer Monday morning blues every day of the week. The Yiddish proverb, “The hardest work is to go idle,” rings truer than ever. We envy our beloved pets when they stretch out in a patch of inviting sun or dream away rainy days, not realizing that we, too, can curl up with the idea of doing nothing. Even foxes and squirrels pause in the survival game to soak up an hour of summer. Unplugging brings us back to our breath, aligns us with our true North and prompts our blood pressure to drop a few numbers. Taking a little time to exhale and watch the clouds overhead can also kickstart our immune systems. If need be, we can appease the to-do lister inside of us by scheduling half an hour of inactivity into the weekly calendar, and when we realize how much we like shooting the breeze, we can increase it to an hour. Consider the last time we gave ourselves permission to sip a little freedom and watch the grass grow. Poet Winifred Druhan noted, “Wasting time is being free.” We won’t win any accolades for doing nothing, but we’ll surely be happier. Marlaina Donato is an author, composer and painter. Connect at WildflowerLady.com. July 2022
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