When I first learned about digital gardening a few months ago, I did a deep dive into my options.
1. Super fancy highly technical gardens via my own website that super fancy highly technical people act is soooo easy to do that anyone could do it but really it is like learning another language.
2. Apps that are pretty cool and either free or low cost but that would necessitate me trusting that they were in it for the long haul and that my digital garden would not randomly vanish one day when I billionaire purchases their app.
3. My own little Weebly website which is yes, still assuming that Weebly isn't going anywhere, but at least feels a little bit more like I have control over my own content though that's probably an illusion.

As you can see, I went with the third option. Of the digital gardening tools I looked at, Sublime was probably the best, although MyMind was pretty cool too. But Sublime, are you an annual garden or perennial garden? My trust of tech is at an all-time low. I didn't want to spend a lot or any time and energy building my garden there only to see it washed away on the whims of some rich weirdo. 

So I'm here. I guess technically this is a blog but I'm calling it my digital garden. The difference between a blog and a DG, or so they tell me, is that a blog is organized chronologically and a DG is organized thematically. Many blogs are often made up of more "formed" thoughts whereas gardens will be more likely to contain "seeds" of ideas. I'm not fancy enough to figure out how I could publish this DG and disregard the timing of my posts, but I at least have my little Categories field menu where folks can click on an idea and find my content. And I'm also not thinking about "writing a blog post" but just about putting thoughts into words and sending them off into the universe. 

Through one of my jobs I'm going to have the chance to attend a talk with David Epstein, author of the new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. A lot of folks know him from his previous book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

I have learned to see constraints in a new way beyond how they are often treated in higher education (like the worst thing ever) living with disabilities and through my creative art practice. For example, challenging myself to make a bunch of the same form (mugs) in ceramics over and over helped me to improve my craft, come up with new ideas for how I could get creative within the constraint, like through my glazing, and also, I think, nudges my ADHD to play a bit nicer with completing tasks. Of course, anyone disability knows a ton about how to adapt to constraints.

When I was writing the ADHD book, I came across a concept that will live rent-free in my mind forever: RICH, or resource-induced coping heuristic. Basically it's the idea that having to work within constraints makes people scrappier, more creative, and better able to adapt to challenging circumstances. Researchers found that ADHDers were "more RICH" than non-ADHD peers. 

I am curious if Epstein will discuss disability. If not, it's a question I plan to ask him. To be honest, I'm going into it with low expectations on this front, which is kind of depressing. It's wild how many people who are doing what appears to be great work are doing great work that assumes a sort of wildly assimilated population of humans. Like I don't get out much at all, but even I can see that a fundamental trait of our species is our diversity. It's just kind of a thing that I deal with and that others do too, that you never know when you go to a workshop or course or talk if the facilitator will have any sense of human diversity and disability. But it sure would be cool if he did!

Corita Kent is one of my favorite artists. She was a nun and a professor, but then she left both the church and higher education and just lived and made her art and wore beautiful dresses. I suspect she both loved her teaching and her God and was exhausted by the bureaucracy of organized religion and schooling. 

 I have been away from my creative practice for about a year. I had been going to a weekly handbuilt ceramics class, but I needed a break. As is typical for me, without that external structure that a formal course provides, I stopped creating. That said, I was thinking back to when I was creating like wildfire in the early pandemic lockdown months and years, but that was a different time. I want and need to get back to making. 

As I was going through some of my old artwork last night I came across Corita's famous list of rules, and of course, the most important one is, "The only rule is work." It doesn't matter what you (I) do or whether it's good or bad or what medium it is or if it says what I want it to say or if it speaks to the collapse era or not. What matters is that you (I) show up and work. 

I also love this first rule for us ADHDers and neurodivergents and anyone struggling with sustaining anything of meaning lately: "Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while." A great example of loving structure. 

I have been exploring the u-Lab: Leading from the Emerging Future course, offered in partnership with MIT. You can read a summary of the concept here via the Garrison Institute. 

“When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.” -Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize-winning chemist

This has me thinking about what it would mean to think of ourselves as islands of coherence akin to adrienne maree brown's "small is all." The size and complexity of the challenges we face are massive "hyperobjects," too big for our brains to process let alone do anything about. And yet, to survive we need to work toward some purpose, and small shifts will disrupt the system. If we do small things in loving community, and a bunch of us are doing those small things, that adds up. We can send messages in bottles perhaps between our islands, sharing our small coherences, borrowing and building upon each other's ideas. It is not nothing. 

I cannot help but write this to the sounds of "Islands in the Stream" playing in my head. Dolly and Kenny. I trust in Dolly. Was Kenny a good or bad man? I am tired of google men's names with "and controversy" to find out.