Digital gardening has been an interest of mine for a long while.
Basically, it’s an alternative to a blog that focuses on the process of crafting something rather than the “final piece.” It’s about organically tending to the knowledge one creates. It’s a practice and idea that’s been around for more than 30-years now.
While I’d love to write a proper essay about the history of the practice, I’ll just point to Maggie Appleton’s insightful write-up.
I’ve always been disappointed I missed out on the internet’s “blogging era.” People would write blogs in response to another’s—either in reflection or reaction—in a more thoughtful, longform way.
One purpose of this Substack is to lower the barrier of entry to start planting the various seeds that I can grow into full articles, essays, and books.
Another is to bring that social-writing aspect to publishing consistently.
Why I want a digital garden
Apart from the slower, organic method of iterative writing, I want to build my own garden to have my own owned space. My website is my little corner of the internet.
I want to use my website for myself, and grow it over the years. I admire the people who have kept the practice up over the years, regularly exploring their various archives for inspiration, learning, and curiosity: Simon Collison, Elliot Jay Stocks, Dan Mall, Jeremy Keith, Ethan Marcotte.
However, they align with more “traditional” blogging patterns than a digital garden orientation. For some inspiration there: Maggie Appleton, Winnie Lim, Mike Caulfield, Joel Hooks, and Tom Critchlow.
Neuroemergent time
Time is one of those concepts that doesn’t make sense much to me. I understand it from a needed standard measure of unit, as well as the implications when deadlines & expectations are set according to it.
With digital gardening, my site becomes something that grows organically. I can come back to and re-publish, while growing a forest sounds extremely enticing.
Marta Rose of Divergent Design Studios shares a concept that I’m intimately familiar yet never found a name for it: neuroemergent time.
It aligns with Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity and Ali Abdaal’s Feel Good Productivity.
Basically, she uses an elliptical orbit metaphor, how things speed up when close to specific parts of an orbit, but they also slow down during the rest of it. She breaks it down into two orbital phases:
- Getting shit done: phase with periods of intense concentration, energy, and productivity; and
- Gathering stardust: phase of spiral orbit with periods of stillness, staring out windows, and diving down rabbit holes.
It’s a beautiful concept of time; and I get it.
Purposeful making
One of the reasons my website’s taken so many months to build is that I hadn’t found its purpose. There are so many purposes & aspects of what a website “should be” today that I couldn’t bring myself out of it. It’s aligned with the challenge of finding a job or clients the past years: “fitting into a neurotypical box.”
I’ve been trying to work in neurotypical expectations rather than figuring out how to tell my story, communicating difference, and managing expectations of the what those differences mean.
I’ve now reset, and will start publishing my new website in the coming weeks because:
- I need to get this done so I can focus on other things;
- I will never be “finished” so I need to start as barebones as possible and build up from there;
- I can redesign things later when I have a wealth of content;
- I want to start using my website for my own content creation.
Inspirations & Aspirations
Long term, I hope to create a Membership Program to fund writing, photography, and making things. Craig Mod does this with his various newsletters, eventually funding multiple photographic-essay books and his own writing practice.
I love the idea of “unlocking the commons,” named by Tim Carmody about another membership program, Kottke.org.
In the end, launching a paid membership program is maybe the smartest thing I’ve done: 2019 was the most productive and creatively engaged year of my life. And I owe the brunt of that to SPECIAL PROJECTS. A rapturous THANK YOU to everyone who joined. It has not been “easy,” or effortless. In fact, 2019 was the year I worked harder and with more question marks lingering over my head than ever. But the membership program created a formality and from that formality I divined a permission — both financially and spiritually (my members are incredibly supportive) — to work deeply on topics I find interesting and important.
Long story, short
I have purpose, direction, and clarity for a first time in a long while of my website. I definitely took the “long way around” to get here, but it’s extremly refreshing.