Here is a zine inspired by my friend Steven Tomlinson. (Steven also inspired one of my favorite bits in Steal Like an Artist.) Most of what I learned was from The Book of Seeds. (If you scroll to the end of this post, there’s a PDF you can print out with a video tutorial to make your own!)
Here is a PDF of the zine that’s free to download and print so you can make it into your own booklet:
Here is a video showing how to fold and cut and fold and glue it into a booklet:
I have exactly one thing to thank our outgoing president for: my diary habit.
I have always kept notebooks, but starting in January 2017, I started keeping an old-fashioned, bonafide diary. 3+ pages every morning, no matter what. (Before anybody asks me what brand of notebooks I use, just shop here.) I realized early on in this administration, I was going to need a good place to have bad ideas, a place not Twitter, to shout into the void.
My diary habit led to starting to blog daily again in October 2017, and by February 2018, I had the “How To Keep Going” talk written. That talk led to Keep Going the book, which came out in 2019. So, I guess I could thank the ex-president for the end of the trilogy, too, considering I wrote it as an answer to the question, “What if we have to live through a second term?” (I did not anticipate that “second term” would be swapped out for “global pandemic.”)
I forgot, somehow, that the original ending of the talk was: “Spend time on something that will outlast them.” This was based on the Leonard Woolf “Planting Iris” story I wrapped the talk with:
For the book we went with the more — positive? — line, “Plant your garden,” which was a better container for thinking about seasonal time. I still like that original line, but I would change it now to: “Spend time on something that will outlast them this.”
“This” is whatever the this is in the phrase, “this, too, shall pass.”
What seeds are you planting now that will flower long after this pandemic, this administration… maybe even this life?
I’m hopeful and I’m happy, today, but I still have the same mission:
Stay alive, get weird, and plant your seeds.
In David Lynch’s Catching The Big Fish he writes about how ideas are like catching fish, but this video contains a really beautiful collage of him speaking about ideas, not just as fish, but also as seeds:
Ideas are so beautiful and they’re so abstract. And they do exist someplace. I don’t know if there’s a name for it. And I think they exist, like fish. And I believe that if you sit quietly, like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas. The real, you know, beautiful, big ones swim kinda deep down there so you have to be very quiet, and you know, wait for them to come along. …
If you catch an idea, you know, any idea, it wasn’t there and then it’s there! It might just be a small fragment, of, like I say, a feature film or a song of a lyric or whatever, but you gotta write that idea down right away. And as you’re writing, sometimes it’s amazing how much comes out, you know, from that one flash…
So, you get an idea and it is like a seed. And in your mind the idea is seen and felt and it explodes like it’s got electricity and light connected to it. And it has all the images and the feeling. And it’s like in an instant you know the idea, in an instant…
Then, the thing is translating that to some medium. It could be a film idea or a painting idea or a furniture idea. It doesn’t matter. It wants to be something. It’s a seed for something. So, the whole thing is translating that idea to a medium. And in the case of film, it takes a long time and you always need to go back and stay true to that idea…
Lynch talks about ideas the way Lynda Barry talks about images and Nick Cave talks about songs — that they live somewhere else, that they’re not inside trying to get out, they’re outside trying to get in.
See also: “Look at your fish.”
(h/t Rob Walker)
One simple thing I’ve noticed when revisiting notebooks and doing my year-end reviews is how many things that blossom and bear fruit in one year were planted as seeds years before. (Maybe even decades before!) It makes me wonder how many seeds are sprouting right now…
Jeanne Marie Laskas once asked her friend Fred Rogers if the show was his church.
He thought a moment. He said it was easier to say what it wasn’t. It was not a show. He used the word “program,” never “show.”
“An atmosphere,” he said. What he was trying to create with “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was “an atmosphere that allows people to be comfortable enough to be who they are.” He continued: “I really don’t want to superimpose anything on anybody. If people are comfortable in that atmosphere, they can grow from there, in their own way.
“A lot of this — all of this — is just tending soil.”
Jesus told a parable about about a farmer who went out to sow seeds.
Some of the seeds fell along his path and got gobbled up by birds. Some of the seeds fell into rocks and sprouted almost immediately, but since they had no soil to take root, they scorched when the sun came out. Some of the seeds fell in deep, fertile soil, and those seeds took root and yielded much fruit.
I think Jesus may have left out at least one potential scenario: Later, the birds shit out the seeds, and by chance, some of them land in good soil elsewhere.
Sometimes I feel like, to quote Dylan, I’m just like that bird!
See also: Beautiful things grow out of shit
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