the Garden is a permission slip.
A permission slip to:
make a message of your mess — turn your sorrows, your loves, your wacky jokes into beautiful works of art, with your own colors, designs, and style.
let the Mysteries be the Mysteries — not everything has to be explained, labeled, reduced to a metric, a label, a diagnosis.
guard the Holy of Holies within you — the secret chamber in your heart that is off limits to algorithms, categorization, extraction, and manipulation.
laugh loudly and often — and be your wild, wondrous, precious self — in a culture that takes itself way too seriously.
love the stranger — let your heart overflow with love, and offer blessings in a culture of grievance and suspicion.
use AI without shame or apology — use AI to amplify your gifts, to help you say YES! to life, in your own unique way.
defy AI without shame or apology — think for yourself, as a fleshient creature, and shout NO! to the AI as often as you wish.
the Garden is a real space
The Garden is a real, working platform. You can name the creatures moving inside you, plant seeds, compost weeds, animate your words, and watch them sprout into letters, songs, images, and animations. You can even step inside your interior in three dimensions, in the ⟨inner⟩Verse.
what this Substack is
This Substack is not the Garden. It is the front porch. Here we share wellgorithms from the Garden in condensed form, adapted for Substack limitations, along with songs, new words, and holy foolishness.
The Garden is a separate space where the tending happens. We’re renovating it this summer and welcoming a new cohort in the fall. Subscribe here and reserve an early place on our waiting list:
the Garden was here long before AI
The words and wellgorithms were created over decades, long before generative AI arrived. We use AI in parts of the work — with full disclosure, under the Silvanus protocol. It helps us generate images and produce finished recordings from human-created lyrics. AI is the helper, not the source.
many gardeners, many styles 🌻🌾🌷
These letters, songs, manifestos, jokes, and designs are examples of what one gardener has made. The Garden has no official style or required point of view. I simply got it started and serve now as its first caretaker. I’m sharing my tools, not telling you what to plant. You are welcome to create your own wellgorithms — with your own words, your own colors, your own designs.
the Garden is welcoming
One of my life’s verses is Matthew 5:16 — I built the Garden to glorify God.
Another life verse is 1 Rock 4:9 — “Love the stranger without grumbling.” So if you are not of the faith, you are still very welcome here.
The Garden is like a spiritual hospital. Christians established some of the earliest hospitals, and they welcomed all. The Garden is built in this spirit.
my story
The belt at four, homelessness, the Army, great teachers, catastrophic illness, Christian conversion, decades of rejection, and a woman who stood beside me through it all. Grace looked at the ruins and saw soil.
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the Garden: a 31 year history
The Garden began in 1995 in a battle over words. It has grown through illuminated books, digital sabbaths, virtual reality, and the Silvanus protocol — planted, failed, composted, and replanted until a naming and cultivation commons finally bloomed.
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electricity for your soul
Electricity shocked us until Ben Franklin gave it a family of words — charge, current, conductor, battery. The words helped us unleash its power. Now AI is shocking us. Wellgorithms give us words to make sense of the shocks, and to harness our inner power — they’re like electricity for our souls.
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