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By Category1 — Creativity & Curiosity
1 — Creativity & Curiosity
2 — Making & Art
2 — Making & Art
3 — Mental & Emotional Well-being
3 — Mental & Emotional Well-being
4 — Physical Health
4 — Physical Health
5 — Intentional Living
5 — Intentional Living
6 — Writing & Reading
6 — Writing & Reading
7 — Teaching
7 — Teaching
8 — Nervous system
8 — Nervous system
9 — Interactions
9 — Interactions
Seeds are Words & Ideas I’ve Collected Along the Way
At the seed stage, I’ve merely collected things. They are other people’s words and ideas in their original format; in other words, raw data. They are planted but in their original form.
FAQs About Seeds
What is a seed in my garden?
A seed is a raw but interesting idea from other people’s work. I’m merely capturing it as a spark that might lead to my own idea.
How do I decide what is worth adding as a seed?
Quote/Note Type | Action |
Insightful/Provocative | ➡️ Create a Seed (as-is or with comment) |
Contextual but meh | ❌ Don’t seed; leave in reading notes as reference only |
Something you're sure you'll act on soon | 🟢 Create Seed + Sprout in one go |
How do I collect seeds?
Most seeds are collected through reading—either on my Kindle or in Readwise Reader. In both cases, the highlights and notes I collect as I read are pulled into Notion where I can decide what I want to keep as a seed and what is already ready to sprout.
How do seeds in my digital garden compare to the Zettelkasten method?
They are somewhere between fleeting notes and literature notes. Like the Zettlekasten approach, I keep all my literature notes—whether as seeds or just the original notes—within the bibliographic reference so that I still have it. But not all of those are added into my public digital garden; what is here I determined to be insightful or provocative enough to keep in the compost pile.
For when you reach a crossroads
There is so much that I cannot control. When my mind, my awareness, is overcome with the pain and the sorrow of the world, and my deepest prayer is to alleviate the suffering of others, I have a choice. I can choose to spiral into despair and panic and overwhelm, which generally makes me quite useless to others. Or I can choose to embody that which I want to flourish in the world. Presence, peace, love, care. I can embody that with the gas station attendant, the grocery store clerk, the neighbor at an airbnb I’m only calling home for two nights
what diplomacy is…safety
That’s what true diplomacy is. Helping people feel safe enough to stay, to listen, to speak, to stay in relationship.
What work is mine?
And I believe the only way to know what work is ours is to ask ourselves, to answer truthfully, to consult our bodies and our cells and our nervous systems, to trust what we hear without consulting, without making sure someone else approves. ()
Less right and more care
the new world we are building is going to require us to care more about each other’s well-being and survival and flourishing, and less about who is right and who is wrong. ()
Curiosity is a way of interacting
But what I learned is that igniting your curiosity doesn't have to do with what's going on in the outside world, but it has everything to do with how you interact with the outside world and your ability to be present in the outside world, with the outside world, with your community, with your larger community, smaller community, family, friends, work, everything. And I didn't realize at the time that it was my curiosity that had been shut down, but that's what it was. And as an artist, like, holy crap, that's essential. As a parent, very depressing and boring to try to be a parent without curiosity. Like, it's not good for you, it's not good for your kids because they're showing you things and you're like, ugh.
Curious opens up to bad news
And with everything that was going on in the outside world, I did not want to be curious because I felt like being curious was like opening myself up to how many more black men were shot today, how many more acts of racism and sexism and hatred went on today.
Kids are curious
I think curiosity is completely undervalued. And as a parent, it's kind of in your face. My daughter, if left to her own devices, will turn every single thing over, outside the house, inside the house, open everything. Look at the bottom, look at the top, look at it sideways. Does it have a taste? I'm like, ugh, you know, I mean, from the expected to the unexpected.
New Seed
I feel like as women, we're inundated with this list of things that we should do and not do and should feel and not feel. And having a daily practice is not one of those things to add to your list. Meaning like if you don't do it, you're still perfect. If you do it, you're still perfect.
Life is overwhelming
And there was so much going on politically in 2016, that summer, that I was feeling it. Trump was running, like, oh my God. Hillary was running, she was going to win. Oops. You know, there was a lot going on. Black men were being killed more times than I can count. And my daughter was coming home from camp, and I was just feeling like I needed something to clean my palate every day. And I already had a daily yoga practice. I'm a yoga teacher, I was doing that. And it still wasn't, it wasn't enabling me to pick her up and look at her and feel like tomorrow is full of promise. I was like, no, tomorrow is going to be full of more misogyny, more racism, more hatred. How do I parent this, right?
Not here to service the machine
“The machine can try to compress you into something two dimensional, digestible, but that’s not you. And we’re not here to service the machine.” ()
Example of making for discovery
“But there’s another way of making things too. Irene’s stuff…every time I look at it, I can’t help but feel like she was trying to find something. Or maybe get somewhere. Like she was bushwhacking through a very dense forest because something she just had to know lay on the other side.” ()
The trick with curiosity
The trick is to just follow your small moments of curiosity. It doesn't take a massive effort. Just turn your head an inch. Pause for a instant. Respond to what has caught your attention. Look into it a bit. Is there something there for you? A piece of information?
Curiosity is tiny
Passion is a tower of flame, but curiosity is a tiny tap on the shoulder — a little whisper in the ear that says, "Hey, that's kind of interesting…"
Curiosity is always in reach
But curiosity, I have found, is always within reach.
Thinking in terms of seasons
Thinking in terms of seasons really helps relieve time pressure and think more cyclically. One’s seasonal output might follow the natural world—winter for incubating, spring for hatching an idea, summer for collaborating and promoting, autumn for reflection and release. After a few years of experimenting with and identifying my flow, I’ve realized that winter and summer are my inward seasons for personal projects. Spring and autumn are when I am more willing and ready to share my work and teach others what I’ve learned.
This page is a portal
it needed a different word to make it have more weight because then I well, and then I realized that my journals were alters. That's why they feel kind of like living things to me, is that my journals are alters to possibility and potential to the world I dream about for all of us. And I need to hold the threads, the threads of those dreams to not get weighted down by the grief of the work that I do. And so when I say this page is a portal or these pages or portals, it's really an invitation for. (30:29)
Working with your hands makes things happen in your brain
What we want to point out here is that the physical manipulation of things, like direct personal experience of any kind, generates sensory images of all sorts and thus enables thought. Hands-on tinkering leads to minds-on thinkering. Bodily engagement with nature teaches much more than any amount of words or numbers in science books. Doing produces a personal understanding that symbols simply can't.
What is thinkering?
‘Thinkering' is a word that the writer Michael Ondaatje coined in his novel The English Patient to express the genesis of concepts in the mind while tinkering with the hands. Much has been written about the human hand and how its use effects the brain, language and culture (see Frank R. Wilson's The Hand, 1998).
Slip-box: focus on thinking, instead of remembering
The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering. ([Location 657]
What it means to be a maker
When we collaborate with reality, we are makers. We are makers when we act in response to life from our true being, instead of merely doing. On the making path we remember we are in relationship with a living world, not just conquering things on our to-do list or molding the world to our utilitarian purposes. ()
on survival
You survive what happened to you, then you survive your survival, and then the gift you’re given is that you fall in love with your whole life, inextricable from the bad thing that happened to you.
seasons for the creator
“The creative moment of a writer comes with the autumn,” wrote Cyril Connelly in . “The winter is the time for reading, revision, preparation of the soil; the spring for thawing back to life; the summer is for the open air, for satiating the body with health and action, but from October to Christmas for the release of mental energy, the hard crown of the year.” ()
art from danger
“Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and as nearly as possible, the definitive utterance of this singularity.”
Rilke on experiencing pain
In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke famously wrote, “So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”
tv for comfort
Research demonstrates that we intuitively gravitate towards reruns when we’re feeling down because doing so increases our communal sense of belonging and decreases loneliness; it’s the parasocial connection that’s comforting us. One study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed that watching reruns of your favorite show “buffers against drops in self-esteem and mood and against increases in feelings of rejection commonly elicited by threats to close relationships.” (Location 3066)
What it means to protest
In beginning such work, we take endings into our own hands, perhaps for the first time. And this is exactly what I see students doing; acknowledging the despair and rage of countless unchosen endings, and asking again and again “what life must become going forward.” It is an empowering and world-making shift.
Unwanted endings
Unwanted endings often reveal a web of other potential endings that may become undeniably necessary and even impossibly enticing; ways of living that no longer work, outdated relational styles, choices around consumption, and productivity.
Dore on forgiveness
To the degree that forgiveness means finding closure or redemption or a way to feel better about this reality it is not just a pointless, but a violent idea. If, on the other hand, forgiveness involves looking unflinchingly at the harms done and imagining “what a wronged life lived well might be,” it comes with clear work to do and an invitation to make life otherwise. It comes with practices and habits and ways to take up, alongside pain that will not go away.
Dore, quotes from Savransky
Counter-apocalyptic thinking is a reminder that endings are both inherent to reality and “the only thing in this world that is worth beginning.” And for Savransky, “to suggest that the end of the world must be begun is to affirm that the otherwise must be made, and to proffer an invitation…for an ongoing and unfinished experimentation with divergent modes of inhabiting the Earth.”
Potts’ notion of forgiveness
Potts’ notion of forgiveness as mourning, which is struggling “with and through and in a loss we cannot redeem” and showing us how to live in the wake of that loss. ()
Jessica Dore on forgiveness
Refusing the need to reconcile what is too late to change or take back, forgiveness makes way for “the only possible future” that can come of it. And though it’s often taken up with some amount of hesitation, forgiveness always entails “a stance of openness toward the future,” from which a “refusal to forget its wrong imagines what a wronged life lived well might be.”
on forward facing
For Potts, forgiveness is “paradoxically forward facing” in that it both “addresses the past so unflinchingly” and “sets itself honestly toward whatever future can actually come to be in the wake of that past.” Rather than ease or peace or closure, the promise of forgiveness may be that it makes livable what can’t be undone.
Dore quoting Keller on apocalypse
I read Facing Apocalypse by theologian Catherine Keller. In it, she notes the meaning of the word apocalypsos as “unveiling, thus revelation.” For Keller, apocalypse is “disclosure, not closure. Not a closing down of the world, but an opening up.” ()
NEW
NEW
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52
I think curiosity is completely undervalued. And as a parent, it's kind of in your face. My daughter, if left to her own devices, will turn every single thing over, outside the house, inside the house, open everything. Look at the bottom, look at the top, look at it sideways. Does it have a taste? I'm like, ugh, you know, I mean, from the expected to the unexpected.
Jul 15, 2025
Publish
51
I feel like as women, we're inundated with this list of things that we should do and not do and should feel and not feel. And having a daily practice is not one of those things to add to your list. Meaning like if you don't do it, you're still perfect. If you do it, you're still perfect.
Jul 15, 2025
Publish
45
But curiosity, I have found, is always within reach.
Jul 15, 2025
Publish
35
‘Thinkering' is a word that the writer Michael Ondaatje coined in his novel The English Patient to express the genesis of concepts in the mind while tinkering with the hands. Much has been written about the human hand and how its use effects the brain, language and culture (see Frank R. Wilson's The Hand, 1998).
Jun 9, 2025
Published but raw
Published but raw
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URL
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25
The slip-box is designed to present you with ideas you have already forgotten, allowing your brain to focus on thinking instead of remembering. ([Location 657]
Jun 8, 2025
Publish
Published but raw
24
When we collaborate with reality, we are makers. We are makers when we act in response to life from our true being, instead of merely doing. On the making path we remember we are in relationship with a living world, not just conquering things on our to-do list or molding the world to our utilitarian purposes. (Location 215)
May 6, 2025
Publish
Published but raw
21
“The creative moment of a writer comes with the autumn,” wrote Cyril Connelly in An Unquiet Grave. “The winter is the time for reading, revision, preparation of the soil; the spring for thawing back to life; the summer is for the open air, for satiating the body with health and action, but from October to Christmas for the release of mental energy, the hard crown of the year.” (View Highlight)
Nov 10, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
19
Research demonstrates that we intuitively gravitate towards reruns when we’re feeling down because doing so increases our communal sense of belonging and decreases loneliness; it’s the parasocial connection that’s comforting us. One study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology showed that watching reruns of your favorite show “buffers against drops in self-esteem and mood and against increases in feelings of rejection commonly elicited by threats to close relationships.” (Location 3066)
Jul 5, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
22
“Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and as nearly as possible, the definitive utterance of this singularity.”
Nov 10, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
23
In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke famously wrote, “So don’t be frightened, dear friend, if a sadness confronts you larger than any you have ever known, casting its shadow over all you do. You must think that something is happening within you, and remember that life has not forgotten you; it holds you in its hand and will not let you fall. Why would you want to exclude from your life any uneasiness, any pain, any depression, since you don’t know what work they are accomplishing within you?”
Nov 10, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
18
You survive what happened to you, then you survive your survival, and then the gift you’re given is that you fall in love with your whole life, inextricable from the bad thing that happened to you.
Apr 10, 2025
Publish
Published but raw
17
In beginning such work, we take endings into our own hands, perhaps for the first time. And this is exactly what I see students doing; acknowledging the despair and rage of countless unchosen endings, and asking again and again “what life must become going forward.” It is an empowering and world-making shift.
May 5, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
16
Unwanted endings often reveal a web of other potential endings that may become undeniably necessary and even impossibly enticing; ways of living that no longer work, outdated relational styles, choices around consumption, and productivity.
May 5, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
15
To the degree that forgiveness means finding closure or redemption or a way to feel better about this reality it is not just a pointless, but a violent idea. If, on the other hand, forgiveness involves looking unflinchingly at the harms done and imagining “what a wronged life lived well might be,” it comes with clear work to do and an invitation to make life otherwise. It comes with practices and habits and ways to take up, alongside pain that will not go away.
May 5, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
14
Counter-apocalyptic thinking is a reminder that endings are both inherent to reality and “the only thing in this world that is worth beginning.” And for Savransky, “to suggest that the end of the world must be begun is to affirm that the otherwise must be made, and to proffer an invitation…for an ongoing and unfinished experimentation with divergent modes of inhabiting the Earth.”
May 5, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
13
Potts’ notion of forgiveness as mourning, which is struggling “with and through and in a loss we cannot redeem” and showing us how to live in the wake of that loss. (View Highlight)
May 5, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
12
Refusing the need to reconcile what is too late to change or take back, forgiveness makes way for “the only possible future” that can come of it. And though it’s often taken up with some amount of hesitation, forgiveness always entails “a stance of openness toward the future,” from which a “refusal to forget its wrong imagines what a wronged life lived well might be.”
May 5, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
11
For Potts, forgiveness is “paradoxically forward facing” in that it both “addresses the past so unflinchingly” and “sets itself honestly toward whatever future can actually come to be in the wake of that past.” Rather than ease or peace or closure, the promise of forgiveness may be that it makes livable what can’t be undone.
May 5, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
5
I read Facing Apocalypse by theologian Catherine Keller. In it, she notes the meaning of the word apocalypsos as “unveiling, thus revelation.” For Keller, apocalypse is “disclosure, not closure. Not a closing down of the world, but an opening up.” (View Highlight)
May 5, 2024
Publish
Published but raw
44
Thinking in terms of seasons really helps relieve time pressure and think more cyclically. One’s seasonal output might follow the natural world—winter for incubating, spring for hatching an idea, summer for collaborating and promoting, autumn for reflection and release. After a few years of experimenting with and identifying my flow, I’ve realized that winter and summer are my inward seasons for personal projects. Spring and autumn are when I am more willing and ready to share my work and teach others what I’ve learned.
Jul 9, 2025
Publish
Published but raw
37
it needed a different word to make it have more weight because then I well, and then I realized that my journals were alters. That's why they feel kind of like living things to me, is that my journals are alters to possibility and potential to the world I dream about for all of us. And I need to hold the threads, the threads of those dreams to not get weighted down by the grief of the work that I do. And so when I say this page is a portal or these pages or portals, it's really an invitation for. (30:29)
Jun 12, 2025
Sprouted
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Sprouted
58
There is so much that I cannot control. When my mind, my awareness, is overcome with the pain and the sorrow of the world, and my deepest prayer is to alleviate the suffering of others, I have a choice. I can choose to spiral into despair and panic and overwhelm, which generally makes me quite useless to others. Or I can choose to embody that which I want to flourish in the world. Presence, peace, love, care. I can embody that with the gas station attendant, the grocery store clerk, the neighbor at an airbnb I’m only calling home for two nights
Jul 16, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
57
That’s what true diplomacy is. Helping people feel safe enough to stay, to listen, to speak, to stay in relationship.
Jul 16, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
56
And I believe the only way to know what work is ours is to ask ourselves, to answer truthfully, to consult our bodies and our cells and our nervous systems, to trust what we hear without consulting, without making sure someone else approves. (View Highlight)
Jul 16, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
55
the new world we are building is going to require us to care more about each other’s well-being and survival and flourishing, and less about who is right and who is wrong. (View Highlight)
Jul 16, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
54
But what I learned is that igniting your curiosity doesn't have to do with what's going on in the outside world, but it has everything to do with how you interact with the outside world and your ability to be present in the outside world, with the outside world, with your community, with your larger community, smaller community, family, friends, work, everything. And I didn't realize at the time that it was my curiosity that had been shut down, but that's what it was. And as an artist, like, holy crap, that's essential. As a parent, very depressing and boring to try to be a parent without curiosity. Like, it's not good for you, it's not good for your kids because they're showing you things and you're like, ugh.
Jul 15, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
53
And with everything that was going on in the outside world, I did not want to be curious because I felt like being curious was like opening myself up to how many more black men were shot today, how many more acts of racism and sexism and hatred went on today.
Jul 15, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
50
And there was so much going on politically in 2016, that summer, that I was feeling it. Trump was running, like, oh my God. Hillary was running, she was going to win. Oops. You know, there was a lot going on. Black men were being killed more times than I can count. And my daughter was coming home from camp, and I was just feeling like I needed something to clean my palate every day. And I already had a daily yoga practice. I'm a yoga teacher, I was doing that. And it still wasn't, it wasn't enabling me to pick her up and look at her and feel like tomorrow is full of promise. I was like, no, tomorrow is going to be full of more misogyny, more racism, more hatred. How do I parent this, right?
Jul 15, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
49
“The machine can try to compress you into something two dimensional, digestible, but that’s not you. And we’re not here to service the machine.” (Location 2521)
Jul 15, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
48
“But there’s another way of making things too. Irene’s stuff…every time I look at it, I can’t help but feel like she was trying to find something. Or maybe get somewhere. Like she was bushwhacking through a very dense forest because something she just had to know lay on the other side.” (Location 2272)
Jul 15, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
47
The trick is to just follow your small moments of curiosity. It doesn't take a massive effort. Just turn your head an inch. Pause for a instant. Respond to what has caught your attention. Look into it a bit. Is there something there for you? A piece of information?
Jul 15, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
46
Passion is a tower of flame, but curiosity is a tiny tap on the shoulder — a little whisper in the ear that says, "Hey, that's kind of interesting…"
Jul 15, 2025
Publish
Sprouted
36
What we want to point out here is that the physical manipulation of things, like direct personal experience of any kind, generates sensory images of all sorts and thus enables thought. Hands-on tinkering leads to minds-on thinkering. Bodily engagement with nature teaches much more than any amount of words or numbers in science books. Doing produces a personal understanding that symbols simply can't.
Jun 9, 2025
For when you reach a crossroads
what diplomacy is…safety
What work is mine?
Less right and more care
Curiosity is a way of interacting
Curious opens up to bad news
Kids are curious
New Seed
Life is overwhelming
Not here to service the machine
Example of making for discovery
The trick with curiosity
Curiosity is tiny
Curiosity is always in reach
Thinking in terms of seasons
This page is a portal
Working with your hands makes things happen in your brain
What is thinkering?
Slip-box: focus on thinking, instead of remembering
What it means to be a maker
seasons for the creator
tv for comfort
art from danger
Rilke on experiencing pain
on survival
What it means to protest
Unwanted endings
Dore on forgiveness
Dore, quotes from Savransky
Potts’ notion of forgiveness
Jessica Dore on forgiveness
on forward facing
Dore quoting Keller on apocalypse