Mind Gardening

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Welcome

I write to think. An idea is often fuzzy and vague untill I've put it down in full sentences and watch it develop as it transforms into full paragraphs.

After enough years of filling book margins and notebooks with half-to-over-baked-thoughts, I decided I needed to keep thoses thoughts somewhere they could be visible and connect to each other. I've been grappeling with the recurring sense that "everything is the same thing". I kept finding connections between seemingly unrelated things, and at first it felt almost pathological — am I noticing a real structure or building a private cult of three or four threads I can stretch over anything. But I came to think the pattern had merit, and that it came from where I put my attention. I tend to dwell on upstream questions and on the wonder-why. Because those questions sit underneath everything else, they end up being the background the other ideas are arranged against. So of course connections show up. I want to lay them out. Here I am. Here they are.

I got inpired by this scattered tradition of "digital gardens" — sites that are explicitly not-quite-finished, not-quite-published, halfway between a notebook and a blog. I like that they don't pretend to be done. They have seasons, and parts that fail. That said, my mind garden is a fairly unkept one but I'm enjoying the process of slow tending to it.

It's an idiosyncratic garden. I'm a researcher by training, scattered by nature and not a philosopher by any means, but still that's the discipline I've always been most drawn to. The garden is where I try, in my own way, to take myself and the world seriously.

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Mind Gardening

Connections