I spent many years thinking about how to organize and share my thoughts
Having spent a period of time thinking about this is not uncommon; I find some comfort in that I’m not the only one out here with a wasteland of discarded blogs that each went strong for maybe 3 months.
https://mooncasted.work/about/
It’s probably been almost 10 years since the last genuine attempt at this. My figurative typewriter hasn’t been entirely idle though! I started journaling pretty actively in 2018 (mostly about my day-to-day opinions and happenings, but occasionally some more in-depth explorations of ideas). It was a way to process what I was thinking and feeling without dumping everything on friends. This was great, but I’d sometimes feel it was a bit lonely (and stingy) keeping all these things completely to myself. I would feel like I “used up” my vulnerability on my journal and would feel very centered and at peace with friends - which in theory is healthy, but there’s a certain closeness you can only get from sharing your rawest thoughts and messiest moments.
Digital gardening
In 2022 I started sharing a pruned and curated version of these thoughts and notes in a wiki-style digital garden. A living, breathing, cute little internet thing. It’s going pretty well! It’s helpful to revisit concepts I’ve come across and touch them up as I gain more understanding and to make links between ideas. I’ve even gotten a few messages from readers (wow it feels so weird to use that word lol) who’ve encountered my page and had interesting things to say!
I didn’t write much though.
After some time I realized that, for me, chronological blog posts expressive in a way that evergreen wiki pages aren’t. A temporary feeling is what gets me to write more freely and share more generously - wasn’t that the motive in the first place? And what about the added dimension of seeing what the chicken-scratch looked like before their ideas were refined? Where’s the genuine, ugly fidelity of learning in public if we go back and keep overwriting our thoughts over and over again?
I came to a similar conclusion in my drawing and painting practice; I posted loose sketches and studies on a “siyang-art-dump” separate from my main page. It got me to sketch more. So why not make a “siyang everything dump”? I’ve actually thought about this so much that it’s become a meme in my journal…
So I decided to start a blog again! I think some parts of me did not want to pull the trigger. I kept thinking back to the digital gardening ethos and how I interpreted it. I talked to some other people who maintain digital gardens for themselves and it seemed like most leaned towards putting everything there, instead of keeping posts on the post website and notes on the notes website.
Yet again I found myself agonizing over a decision I’d already “made”! After all, agonizing is one of only two things I know; the other is suddenly and spontaneously deciding to “choose both”.
While continuing to tend to my digital garden and adding as much as I can, I also would have a space to vocalize and share, and to snap baby pictures of the saplings that will get us to the bonsai trees we’ll tend to for years and years.
The system (for the moment)
I intend to blog about things I’m thinking and feeling now, and plant to the garden things I continue to think about. These are not mutually exclusive. Things will, and should, overlap; at least until they have grown into something else entirely. If you want a thriving garden, you need to do some weeding too.
I imagine the funnel to flow like this:
- A smattering of note-taking apps, sketchbooks, physical journals, “xeets”, conversations, stub pages in the digital garden itself, etc… with globs of nebulous ideas. The raw material, the unraked soil, the weeds that grow in the shade behind the barn
- Chronological blog (I have evidently decided on substack for now) to capture these fragments into some more coherent string of thoughts. Snapshots in time of the young sprouts before they’ve been planted in a more permanent place
- Interlinked evergreen versions of these planted in my digital garden and continuously nurtured
Other thoughts
- One thing I’ve already noticed is that any prose written in my blog is going to sound a lot more coherent than a lot of what’s in my digital garden today. Many pages are just a list of bullet points that link to other pages without much explanation, or pages created purely for the sake of connecting other pages. I believe this is a symptom of “not writing much”, due to the wiki format not being the most natural way for me to write in an organized way. I think going through the process of writing blog posts, even if they’re not entirely about the concepts I’d have in my garden, will help me flesh out the things I keep encountering day to day.
- Of course, working notes will still exist there, and so maybe it’s not entirely fair to use the blog -> garden hierarchy. Both blog and garden can contain ideas at all phases of maturity. The main difference is that reaching a new level of understanding is a page update for a garden, and a new post entirely for a blog.
- Sometimes I don’t like the word “dump”. I don’t actually need a centralized place where everything haphazardly gets dumped in its rawest form (the top of the system’s funnel can have many sources). It’s good to collect and curate a little, in little bundles like a newspaper or a zine. A show-and-tell of sorts. Art goes on the art website and songs go on the song website, and here’s a little collection of the latest bit of everything in progress with some of my thoughts on them. That’s a bit more pleasant-sounding than a “dump”.
- It might also be super obvious which writings naturally fit a chronology: for example, accounts of a trip or development journal of a project. What I want out of these types of posts is for the core ideas and learnings to get tumbled in different bags of words until something interesting comes out that I can take and plant.
Original post on substack: https://unevenlyeven.substack.com/p/a-system-for-ephemera-and-eternita