Engaging with the text

I broke my website a bit—nothing big, just a file name change needed in some places—so I'm not writing this in my digital garden's journal, where I'd typically write.

I've been tending & cultivating my garden, iteratively, over the past year. After multiple diverse seasons, it's time to hunker down for winter and prepare the garden for the deciduous yearly awakening.

Engaging with the act of intentional digital gardening—emergently cultivating knowledge on one's little plot of space on the Internet—is more concisely encapsulated by:

The process is the point.

In the way the act of writing by hand changes how the brain wrinkles, retain, and aids in memory storage—the act of creating is the point.

It's been something I've been working on for years, developing thoughtful consumption habits: engaging through conscientious intention. A lot of it is built from setting rules for myself to ensure that intention is executed.

This is the "soil" of my digital garden. What comes in and how that's digested impacts...what comes out.

Flowing to'n'fro, digital'n'physical

I need to better align this intentional cultivation with my physical engagement with books.

I've been dog-earing books for years. It helps me understand how much I liked the book, and where there are nice things I want to come back to. A book thick with dog ears mean: it's a good'un and I want to come back to it some day. To see how I've grown & changed, since.

For the past few years, I've started actively reading, pen in hand. I dog-ear, document sparkful marginalia, underlining quotes, and noting interest-capturing sentences. Last year, I expanded to Fiction; part of continuing to improve my own writing—Seeing and Learning from the author's own execution and Craft.

These two systems haven't scaled.

Building my garden's library

Since levelling-up my garden, it's time to be more intentional with my tsundoku garden of books & the home library.

I built up my digital / library with 40-some books I always recommend and have influenced my various crafts & practices. Each book listed can have quotes, citing: location information, quote, and commentary.

For a while, summer 2025, I was typing quotes on my phone as I came across them, documenting in real time. That iteration was short-lived, causing too much disruption to the flow of reading while engaging with the book as an artifact.

I've yet to transplant those quotes into my garden. It was a short lived iteration, causing too much disruption to the flow of reading & enjoying the process of book as artifact.

I need to blaze a pathway to make it easy, to lowering cognitive load for digitization & documentation.

The process is the point.

A new practice

I've pulled out my pen—I always try to have at least one in my pocket—gathered stickies, and created my first index.

Definkng the colors to differentiate:

things to quote;

things to cite;

things to follow-up with; and...

likely many more.

But, first.

Keep it short and simple.