Mind gardening

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Welcome

I write to think. Always have. There's something I can't quite see about an idea until I've put it down in full sentences and watched what it does there. Thoughts I haven't written are slippery — I think I have them, and then they're gone, or they turn out to have been a feeling rather than a thought.

After enough years of doing this in private notes, I wanted somewhere to keep them where they could 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 — you can't easily tell, from inside, whether you're noticing real structure or building a private cult of three or four threads you 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: the wondering, the why, the basic ones. And 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.

Then I learned about 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. What I decided to can my mind garden is a fairly unkept one. Some thoughts are wild; some beds I haven't visited in months; some paths I'm still putting up signs along. There's also a fair amount of weeds. That's the honest description of what you're walking into.

So what's in it right now: a bed on housing policy and abundance, a cluster on Dostoevsky because his dramatising of characters' minds has always fascinated me, and I keep returning to it, Beauvoir's Ethics of Ambiguity, which I've read a thousand times but have only partly managed to metabolise, Voltaire and Macintyre at opposite ends of the same path, Cioran when I want to feel unsupervised... It's an idiosyncratic garden. I'm a researcher by training, not a philosopher; But I read philosophy seriously. So I guess I am is someone whose technical work kept running into questions her technical training didn't equip her to ask. The garden is where I try, in my own way, to take those questions seriously.

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A mind that needs some gardening

Connections