When I first started this website, I was looking for a way out of social media—the endless scrolling, noise, distraction, and feeling of being pulled outward. I wanted something that could bring me back to myself and my inner world. At first, I imagined it as a kind of personal social media: a place to share whatever I was thinking about, learning, noticing, or interested in at the moment. But after a long hiatus from working on my novel, and then returning to it, something about the purpose of this space began to change for me.

Returning to my novel meant returning to a strange collection of ideas and themes that had been quietly emerging through it. Many of them weren't things I had consciously decided to write about. They seemed to appear on their own. In writing the story, I found myself encountering ideas that I hadn't known were important to me until they were already there on the page.

Last night, I watched Taste Of Cherry and began looking into Abbas Kiarostami's work again in order to have some context for my reflection on it. I came across a short clip that ended with him saying, “These films are not made by me, they make themselves.” Speaking about the Koker trilogy, he explained that he never intended it to become a trilogy. Each film emerged from what he witnessed while making the previous one. His only real source of inspiration was life—his own observation of it—and one observation simply led to another.

That resonated with me so deeply.

I feel the same way about my own work. Creating is not entirely an act of invention for me. It is a kind of listening. I am both creating and discovering at the same time, acting as a channel for stories, images, observations, and ideas that seem to have their own life. Sometimes I don't understand what something means until I have followed it far enough to see where it leads.

Returning to my novel has felt less like returning to something I had already created and more like being introduced to something that was already waiting for me. That has changed the purpose of my digital garden.

It is becoming less a collection of things I like and more a place to observe what emerges from inside me, to follow the threads that keep appearing, to investigate the ideas I find myself circling, and to understand what I feel compelled to express before I even have the words for it.

In that sense, the garden has become another part of the creative process: a place to stop and look at what is coming through me. Not just a record of what I think, but a way of discovering what I think. It is like a window into the consciousness behind the mind behind the manifestation.