This is not an instruction manual

Journal

03 Feb 2024 — This is not an instruction manual

This journal is partly a tool for myself to liberate the ideas, thoughts and fragments from the weather of my mind. It’s for wading through the complexity, uncertainty, change, transformation of life on this planet, in these times. Through the joy and turbulence of the world, of being human. Like Aja Monet told Annette Lin about poetry, ‘it’s a way of accessing and processing the truth of being here’.

It’s also about sharing. Sharing what I’m learning, what’s reaching me and resonating, finding the patterns amid the chaos.

I am liberated from the weather of my mind.

— Laura McPhee-Browne
in the short story Goddess Garden

Thinking out loud
That’s one of the reasons why this journal isn’t on Substack. This journal is for processing information, for documenting time — moments in, the passing of, looping back on itself. And so it could never sit behind a subscription. If it’s for sharing, then it is always open.

While my website is tied to a website host, I didn’t want to add another platform to engage with. I didn’t want to be tied in to that format. Thanks to prodding by Annabel (who writes a newsletter), I realised I could easily build the journal in Notion (something I already use) and people could add comments — creating a mechanism for engagement. Yet it’s another platform, and one some find intimidating.

I don’t always have visuals for the thinking and sometimes the thinking is long — two reasons why this thinking simply can’t happen on IG. Opening up inner thinking doesn’t need the structure of a newsletter format, and my inner thinking isn’t easily contained by one subject matter or theme or heading. This theorising of where and how will likely reveal itself to be rubbish — hopefully the compostable kind — as it will be immediately and iteratively undone, reworked, understood anew through practise.

I really love Gemma’s writing on her website, melding work and life — I hear her voice and conversational cadence as I’m reading. And Rosie’s writing practice, which leans more personal, reflective, poetic. I think this space will fit somewhere in-between, or all of the above. It’s what I’m learning and unlearning. It’s what I’m reading and listening to. What’s happening in the garden. What I’m working on. How gardening and work are related. How everything is connected. On being, on becoming. On not knowing how to do anything. On trying to know how to garden, how to design with the more-than-human, how to build alternative economies.

But this is not a guide or a template or a recipe.

This not an instruction manual.

Erratic assemblages
I keep a well-documented calendar. The past few years, I’ve tracked the books I’ve read and the films I’ve watched. Exhibitions visited are documented in my calendar with photos on my phone of works that spoke to me and didactics I’d like to revisit. But it all just sits there. It’s the digital equivalent of shoe boxes under the bed filled with random pieces of paper, receipts, matchboxes, and printed photographs. It exists. It’s data. But does it mean anything?

I imagine, one day, I’ll want to remember. I’ll want to read what I thought at 6am on a Tuesday when I dragged myself from bed to go to the patch to water the seedlings and smelled jasmine on the air for the first time that season. I’m often surprised when I return to a journal entry quickly typed in the moment and forgotten for a year or two, and when I return it might include ideas I’m only sitting with now, years later. Or repeat feelings. My mind holds on to so many things — some useful, some useless, not always the good stuff. And it does not hold so many things, many that I’d like to keep and revisit.

The best cheddar is actual from Ireland.

20.05.2021
Dinner at 40 Maltby St

It might be small useful things. Like being able to recall the dates of last year’s heat wave, the last cold snap. I know the starlings arrive, but do they leave? A journal can remind me. These bits and pieces might only make sense or mean something to me: ‘bits of the mind’s string too short to use, an indiscriminate and erratic assemblage with meaning only for its maker,’ Joan Didion wrote.

Wet eyelashes
Skin the colour of apricot sorbet
Coat held closed by a safety pin

20.12.2020
A cold walk in Victoria Park. I didn’t yet own gloves

This space, I think, is a place for finding patterns. One of the things I love about reading and writing and recording and remembering is identifying patterns — strings that start somewhere now, loop back a couple of years to something I read or heard, and then reappear in tomorrow’s conversation. When I’ve read enough and sat with an idea and found connective tissue, it feels so satisfying — perhaps a modern, personal measurement of success. I imagine, an expert in a subject might feel like this all the time. But as a generalist, I dip in and out of multiple subjects, ferment them for easy digestion, publish, and move onto the next. So these patterns appear rarely and exquisitely.

Unsent postcards
That’s originally what prompted this outer, public journal — I was in Toulouse at musée Les Abattoirs in 2019 taking in an exhibition on Spanish art and resistance. At the time, I was reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia about the Spanish Civil War. And then — perhaps cognitive bias — this time and place was everywhere, following me (or I, it) through southern Europe, tentacles unfurling. Picasso connected to Calder connected to Miro, whose foundation in Barcelona is designed by Joseph Luis Sert. Dora Maar, quietly presented among an exhibition focusing on Picasso and Paul Eluard’s friendship. So then we look at the overlooked women — Charlotte Perriand, Berthe Morisot, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Gabrielle Münter. So many threads to unravel.

Often I pick up postcards at exhibitions, intending to send them home — a small unsubstantial stand-in for all the conversations we’re not having, the experiences not shared. But they sit collecting under my desk. Unwritten, unaddressed, unsent. Perhaps if I commit to this journal as a regular practice, each note could be likely widely circulated postcard.

I imagine, perhaps naively, this will be a space of good things. I tend to really sit with the world as it is and try to hold that complexity and find the patterns and find the solutions, and frankly, it’s overwhelmingly. And it’s a downer. I have so many feelings. I’d really like there to be more hope and joy and pleasure. I’d really like Israel to stop bombing Palestine. How can we make those two hopes co-exist in the space of a day, in the space of a year…

I feel so much of what Octavia is guiding us in here is: it’s not wrong to feel, it’s not that we don’t feel, it’s not that we don’t feel it as if it’s happening to us. All of that is real. All of that is there. And we have to train ourselves, teach ourselves: how do we be in right relationship with what we’re feeling? How do we shape and partner with what we’re feeling? So that continuing on, so that survival is a possibilty.

— adrienne maree brown

What are we learning here? I don’t know. Will we remember? Probably not. But it’s here all the same. ‘See enough and write it down,’ Joan Didion again.

Observations are something I’d like to focus on this year. It’s not so much a resolution — or is it? It’s something that’s come up in my interviews lately. Sitting quietly, listening, watching, making time and space for the robin who comes to see if I’ve unearthed any worms while weeding. Making time to watch the parakeets at dawn and dusk. Seeing more intimately. To make better relationships with the land and waters and sky and seasons and climate and place. Rooting into place, even if it’s one I don’t like so much. The place knows I’m here. I’m impacting it. Now, how to make that knowing positive.

Shall we find out?

Lumpy landscape
Lakes up high
Dark and brooding under cloud

12.05.2022
Arriving to Oslo

Further reading
Joan Didion on keeping a notebook

Friends with a writing practice
Gemma Copeland
Rosie Fea
Annabel Vickers
Cat Sarsfield