the Garden: a 31-year journey
I started naming the inner creatures in 1995 — planting, failing, composted and replanted — until something bloomed.
I’ve spent the past 31 years creating a new grammar for the soul because our existing grammar has been hijacked.
I finished naming most of my inner creatures by 2020, long before the AI chatbots came online. What took me so long was everything after the naming — rendering the faces, building the architecture of seeds, weeds, sprouts, and blooms, and porting it all into virtual reality. I envisioned a “new Democreacy” — a creative commons in which we can learn from each other, …
1995 · Wordpower
the true beginning is 1995, an encounter with the raw power of words that unnerves me still; I’m assembling it from an older set of archives, and it will be told —
1999 · Digital Sabbaths
I was actively practicing Orthodox Judaism in the 1990s and when the Internet came online, it was just plain obvious that we needed digital sabbaths.
In the spread above I asked: “How much longer will it be possible for anyone — Orthodox Jew or not — to disconnect from the net?”
The same printed edition contains a number of coinages which are still active in 2026 — Complexity Complex, Time Deficit Disorder, and the Hasteland. Then came the foolery, set down for the pure animal joy of it — fart de grâce, fart accompli, tour de fart — nearly all of which are still in the Garden today:
2003–2004 · Goodbye Gutenberg
In 2004, my wife and I published Goodbye Gutenberg, which won awards from Editor’s Choice, Bookpleasures, and IPPY. The big idea is this: throughout the Middle Ages, books were gorgeously illuminated and hand-painted. Reading was as visual as it was verbal. Then along came the printing press, and while a boon for literacy, we lost the sensuous, embodied experience of reading.
Goodbye Gutenberg showcases illuminated books from Egypt, China, India, Japan, South America, and Europe. Milton Glaser, one of my teachers and mentors, called it “a visual history of the universe.”
The first edition was dedicated to George and Rosemary Lois. I told George that with the new Internet, a new type of artist is emerging — the “designer writer” — blending words, images, and animated type.
2005 .Christ: the Gospel of Matthew
In 2005, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, of what was then Executive Books, published .Christ: the Gospel of Matthew. The URL read www.matthew.christ, with the Sermon on the Mount played in a hand-painted media player.
A personal favorite was the wise men crossing a purple night sky, past a search bar — “Herod searched diligently.” The magi had a star, and a button that said joy. The upper right has some of the most beautiful words ever sung in Hebrew — עוּרִי עוּרִי שִׁיר דַּבֵּרִי, Awake, awake, utter a song, the glory of the Lord is revealed upon you.
The book had many fans, including Zig Ziglar, Paul Meyer, Russell Moore, and Bill Moyers. It predates the new wave of illuminated bibles by at least a decade or more.
2011 · Thou Art Social
I got lyme disease and toxic mold poisoning, my body began to fail, and things turned dark. For six years I sat in an infusion chair, meditating on what social media was doing to our souls.
2016 · Wellgorithms
By 2016, I was slowly healing. When I could sit up to a keyboard, I created many of the first wellgorithm titles that are live in the Garden today, including Progress Pollinator, Stress Blesser, Anger Gangster, Wellectricity, and Gratitude Gardener.
2021 • the (inner)Verse
By 2021, headsets were cheap and I could explore a question I’d been carrying since the infusion chair: if the soul is a garden, what would it be to experience it in virtual reality? What would it be like to actually step inside your metaphors?
We realized that the interior is not a flat thing to be described — it is a space, with position and dimension. The contemplatives like Teresa always knew it but didn’t have the tools to render it in 3D. We also realized something that is becoming increasingly urgent, with the world models that good people like Fei Fei Li are building. The moment you render an interior, you have to decide what an interior is. Every one of your choices is a mirror of your philosophy of the human.
2023 • the innerAI meter
In the spring of 2023, GPT-4 arrived, and overnight the machine could write a clean paragraph in anyone’s voice. So that year we built an innerAI meter to transparently disclose how much of the content is ours. We thought by now some sort of disclosure meter would be commonplace and remain genuinely surprised by its absence. We envision a new era of honest, guilt-free content creation. It’s ok to get help from AI, if we’re transparent. We can learn a great deal from each other.
2026 • the faces
If there is a single common thread that unites the 31 years, it is the language, the wordplay. Most of the wellgorithm titles were coined by 2016. But it took another 10 years for the AI models to help us render their faces. There is a deep, continuously documented tradition in Christian visual culture of assigning faces, figures, and images to emotions, moral states, and virtues, and we see a renaissance of that in the coming years.
2026 • a retrospective
Today’s trillion-dollar companies have mapped your face, your voice, your sleep, your steps, your heartbeat. But given that the garden is one of our richest metaphors, why has no one — with a million times my resources and reach — ever built a garden of wellbeing? Or a naming and cultivation commons?
The honest answer: it’s hard.
A garden is not a math problem. It has a value system, a spirit, a thousand calibrations that no budget buys, and everyone who looks at it has a different opinion about every one of them. The opinions form into committees, and then the committees want to smooth out all the strangeness until it’s just another wellness app — legible, fundable, and lacking soul.
The very thing that makes a garden a garden is Grace — a framing that most organizations are built to shun. They want to quantify Grace and they want assurances that Grace will come. But I’ve learned, sometimes the hard way, that you can’t force Grace upon a project; you can only pray for it.
“You can’t force Grace upon a project; you can only pray for it.”
And so — painful as it was — I’ve come to appreciate the joys and beauties of a wilderness life. I didn’t have to fight, defend, or wait on anyone’s approval. I just did it — planted, failed, composted, replanted — over and over, for three decades, until it bloomed. Now, suddenly, the emails are arriving. People I never met, in fields I would not have guessed, are asking about fleshience, wellgorithms, the Book of Mammons, the Silvanus protocol, and our Adamic vocation.
I tell them that the Garden is live, the gates are open, but that a garden is never finished and this one surely won’t be finished in our lifetimes.
We send you our blessings. May your seeds find good soil. May your faith work its quiet miracles. May a single word of yours put hope into a wounded heart. May you never forget: you are loved, and never alone in the tending
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