Hi, I’m Lex Orgera and Yard Dragon: Plants + Pulp is me writing at the intersections of nature and literature——and digging in the dirt.
Friends! It’s been a minute! I got a new job in December running a literary festival/organization, and I have been trying to figure out the rhythm of this new life. Fewer pajama days, that’s for sure. Lots of meetings. Also lots of fun planning, inviting amazing writers to be part of the festival.
Because I’m having to interact with so many new people IRL, I’ve been thinking a lot about edges and being on them. Meeting new people is tough and full of strange angles, especially when you’re an introvert and also...an alien? I’ll explain.
I’ve always had this inkling that I exist at the border of something, a liminal tightrope between here and there. But where is there? Not here. Even as a little kid, I would close my eyes and see myself floating in space and feel at home there. As a grown person, I teleport to the Kármán line between Earth and space, and I write from there.
In the Misfit’s Manifesto, Lidia Yuknavitch writes, “Misfits know how to resist the homogenizing narratives of culture since we live at the edges. We help culture find new shapes.”
For me, it’s less “knowing how to resist” and more “not knowing how not to.”
And let’s face it, difference is resistance, particularly in a society that rewards the status quo. That might just be a human quality, a biological imperative. I dunno.
∞
In permaculture design, the edge is a place of possibility, a place of richness and diversity. In fact, Principal 11 states, “Use edges and value the marginal.” Toby Hemenway writes this in his home-scale permaculture guidebook, Gaia’s Garden:
Edges are where things happen. Where a forest meets the prairie, where a river flows into the sea, or at nearly any other boundary between two ecosystems is a cauldron of biodiversity....The edge is richer than what lies on either side.
Have you ever spent time in the mangroves? What a world. Thousands of birds make their homes in the branches and even more underwater creatures in the intricate root systems of these edge-dwelling trees that stabilize the coastline from erosion and protect from storm surges.
[There’s a reason Florida is fucked (well, many), and one of them is that most of the coastline and its mangroves have been replaced by concrete.]
In my book, Head Case, I have a whole section about thresholds in relation to understanding the threshold between life and death. Here’s a little bit:
In his essay “The Edge as Threshold,” Gregory Orr writes, “A poet needs to go to that place where energy and intensity concentrate, that place just beyond which chaos and randomness reign.” To thrive on thresholds is to love the possibility of crossing them or to feel the comfort of their presence as untraversable spaces. Depends on your temperament. Docks, shorelines, doorways, cliffs, bridges, lips, window ledges, hiking trails, stoplights, stop signs, welcome mats. Threshold as an act of collision. Centrifugal force. Time-stamp delegation. Two parts, or four, or five make something whole from the broken latitudes and borders of separation. And you are here, and I am there. We are far apart, dots on that old spectrum, but then someone, some part of the whole, gets sick, gets dying, and there it happens: a reassembly of the present tense in which stories are told, ancient solid beings of light and voice.
∞
I hope you are all well and thriving. I have missed you!
Hugs,
Lex
I didn't know Florida ever had mangroves. Not that I spend much time there.