This digital garden 🌱
Earlier this fall, I discovered a post by Mike Grindle(though I can't remember how!) titled "Why Personal Blogging Still Rules," in which he writes:
Your blog doesn’t have to be big and fancy. It doesn’t have to outrank everyone on Google, make money or “convert leads” to be important. It can be something that exists for its own sake, as your place to express yourself in whatever manner you please.
After reading a handful of his posts, I followed my cursor down the marvelous, unexpected paths linked before me. Another tab, another step through a virtual front door. Soon enough, I discovered Bear Blog, which is the platform I'm using as I type this now. I started to find like-minded folks who are writing and thinking and sharing for the pleasure it brings and the curiosity it grows in them—not for the fluffy praise or attention of Big Names and More Likes.
All the open-link-in-new-tabbing led to the discovery of digital gardens. (Probably my most serendipitous internet treasure of 2024!) Design engineer, Maggie Appleton, digs into the history and ethos of digital gardens in this comprehensive essay if you're interested.
I understand digital gardens as an online spot—typically hosted on your own domain or subdomain—to share the ideas, thoughts, writings, etc that you're tinkering with, tending to, and trying to connect dots between. It's not centered around finished work or bound by chronological time or entries. Your digital garden can be revisited and revised whenever, and if you keep up with it long enough, those "seedlings" might just mature into flowers or fruit of some kind.
Maggie Appleton shares that digital gardening:
...gives readers an insight into your writing and thinking process. They come to realise you are not a magical idea machine banging out perfectly formed thoughts, but instead an equally mediocre human doing The Work of trying to understand the world and make sense of it alongside you.
I've been a huge fan of Austin Kleon's blog and though I hadn't known about the "digital gardening" term or metaphor before, I'm certain I've enjoyed his posts because of the raw quality and in-process nature of what he shares there. Maggie Appleton points out how gardens "offer us the ability to present ourselves in forms that aren't cookie cutter profiles. They're the higher-fidelity version, complete with quirks, contradictions, and complexity."
As someone with a HUGE bent toward perfectionism, I feel somewhat squirmy (and phony) having my own digital garden. My harsh, inner critic is too predictable: what if I say everything the wrong way and I embarrass myself and look or sound silly? But you know what? This garden is not a museum or display case. It's a teeny plot of digital space. A place to collect and share what I find interesting or delightful (like art and children's books and nature) in a casual, rough-drafty-thoughts kind of way.
Perhaps there will be interested onlookers and passersby. Maybe an occasional pesky bug will appear. It shouldn't really matter. My work is to show up, in raincoat or in sunhat, and tend. That's what this digital garden—the Tovi Trove—is for. I’m looking forward to whatever it becomes. 🌳