My forest garden of the mind is what I use to refer to the collection of contents of the mind, recorded in media or unrecorded, that I have actively and consciously collected, curated, and cultivated. Therefore, it includes my digital notes and documents, analog materials, and photos.
I use a forest garden as a metaphor to work with my metaphor of wilderness and walking as a metaphor for thinking and exploring mental spaces.
The metaphor is inspired by digital gardening, which involves a sense of ownership to place or at least a relationship between self and space.
My forest garden of the mind has a variety of species in it: essays, poems, vignettes, and photographs.
Walking (i.e., thinking) in the garden starts by collecting seeds and continues with planting them, tending them until they become seedlings and eventually evergreens
Walking leads to the blazing of Trails between plants, which eventually makes creating a topography or map possible.
Exists in cyberspace but also includes text, information. But what is information. This is borderline the platonic realm, a realm beyond mind and matter.
To do
- Connect all notes on zettelkasten and talahardin here.
- Explore how digital gardeners have used campfires as a metaphor and how a forest garden is related to it.
- Explore how forests are used as a metaphor.
Related
- henry bugbee uses the word “tilling” to refer to research, which he seems to differentiate from just letting seeds grow by themselves and not getting involve too much ( See my commentaries on the inward morning by bugbee August 26, 1952).
References
Caufield, M. (2015, October 17). The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral. Hapgood. https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
“The Garden is the web as topology. The web as space. It’s the integrative web, the iterative web, the web as an arrangement and rearrangement of things to one another.”