🌿 My ‘wild’ digital garden: publishing blog posts with all the ‘weeds’

Some of my blog post will follow the ‘digital garden’ concept. The idea is that you don’t need to fully develop and polish a blog post before publishing. Having to do all this hinders me from sharing my (often not yet fully formed) thoughts, what I’m reading, what pops into my head, etc. Instead, posts can be short, unrefined, seedlings instead of fully developed thoughts, which can be updated, added to, etc. Most digital gardens are on static websites that don’t follow a chronological order, as it was originally when blogging hadn’t been invented yet. Most digital gardeners are developers and know how to program. For me, it’s easier to use WordPress and rather than a wiki-like page. The main idea I am taking from the digital garden concept is to move away from what most blogs have become these days: highly polished, SEO-optimised marketing ‘content’.

Besides, I like weeds. One of my interests is foraging (responsibly) for wild plants. This has given me, amongst other things, an appreciation for plants that are dismissively called ‘weeds’. They are often the most nutritious and tasty greens, environmentally friendly, resilient, and often even have medicinal uses.

I want to share my unrefined, incomplete, developing thoughts, or bits of information I have found somewhere, adding to it my notes, without worrying about polishing the blog post, and perhaps unintentionally removing the most interesting bits (the weeds). To keep with the analogy:

I want to cultivate a wild, organic garden of ideas that is interesting to explore.

Another advantage for me is this: Over the years I have read thousands of text, some short some long, some very long, books, articles, blogs, social media posts, newsletter, conference papers… Annotated, highlighted, made notes in various places, curated the links, etc. Often made notes for blog posts but couldn’t complete it. Over time, I have often felt overwhelmed – I was neither able to read more / absorb more, nor offload the burden by writing. It was just too much. It feels like I have this huge balloon filled with water over my head. If it popped, it wouldn’t just make me wet. It’s more like an ocean; I would drown in. I like this better than the metaphor of a huge mountain crushing me. Although, drowning is frightening too… maybe even more so because it takes longer… Ugh, I digress…

So, you will find posts with unrefined thoughts and texts besides fully developed ones here. If you can’t handle it — and here I’m looking at some of my language teacher or editor colleagues 😉— you’ll have to wait until the ideas find their places in proper articles.