Around three years ago, my friend Édouard and I were working on an idea. We saw a cohort of self-initiated learning groups around us, found this an inspiring and important way to work and socialize, and wanted to support this form by providing resources and connecting people together. At the time we called this idea "Sunday School" but a brainstorming session at a café in late-Summer 2016 had us renaming as "Learning Gardens."

Learning Gardens has since become a loose collection of people, projects, spin-offs, and, somehow, part of the landscape of design-oriented online social groups. It has also become an email address, a Slack group, a chain of quasi-related events. It has grown unanticipated tendrils, blossomed into wonderful connections, and nurtured chance assemblages of people who wandered into the same space. 

The crux of Learning Gardens has always been embedded in the name. Gardening is ripe with connotations—the gardener's presence, expectations of work and results, patience for slow growth, getting ones hands dirty, and chance cross-species encounters (intentionally or otherwise). Gardening as a metaphor is powerful today because it is a well-known and physical entity, helping ground digital, political, social, ephemeral, and more generally abstract working that has become so primal to the 21st century. 

Gardening, in the "community garden" sense more than the "jardin à la française," encourages collective resources, shared space, shared outputs, a maintenance-oriented practice, and a little bit of chaos. Gardens are not hard-walled (this would make them greenhouses), but they are separated from "nature" in as much as they are managed and curated towards a vision, however loose that is. 

We've always treaded carefully around how to define Learning Gardens. LG has been, for us, and hopefully others, a living and dynamic exploration of particular conditions, a shell to incubate growth, a container of language and dispositions. I prefer Learning Gardens be thought of as a substrate for growing a social space for learning (growing / making / exploring) together rather than any particular entity. It is too bad, perhaps, that the name is a noun, when I think we are more interested in it being an aura around a type of action, or a verb. 

Or, to quote Ian Hamilton Finlay,  "a garden is not an object but a process". 
(I recommend this essay on Finlay's gardening as poetry practice.)

Under sunshine,
Lukas

 

Hello!

Thanks for being here. My name is Lukas and this is my newsletter.

I want to give a brief description of this thing, partly for me and partly for you. 

This is the first of what I intend to be many emails. I got my first blogspot account in 2006, tumblr in 2008, and since 2015 I've vacillated between hosting blog posts on my personal site and fits and starts of a newsletter. One of my 2019 resolutions—which I generally take seriously—is to write and publish something here weekly (every Saturday). This is a recommitment to public sharing and development of ideas. I have always loved sharing myself on the internet, but have had more intensely mixed feelings lately about closed platforms and how to keep documents accessible despite a dynamic web ecosystem. A more finite email newsletter settles some of these nerves. 

In the time since abandoning my previous blogs and newsletters, my interests have congealed somewhat and I've started a Master's program, in environmental engineering. The discussion around the field in my graduate program has been startlingly narrow, at least as I've found it, especially given it is a realm of study that touches on an amazing number of other sets of ideas we call disciplines. (Environmental science, chemistry, biology, ecology, civil engineering, planning, [landscape] architecture, transportation, anthropology, psychology...) Limited space for broad conversation in my program, and the fact that school required I move away from places where I had established social lives, has lead to a sense of lacking in the kind of conversation that typically gives my thinking structure and makes for synthesis. My brain, right now, is a stewing mess. This writing is to be a starting place. 

The name, or name-at-present I should say, seeks to reflect my goals in writing. "Gnamma" is an Aboriginal term for a crevice or bowl carved into stone over time by water (and/or wind). There are multiple things I love about this term: that it is an emergent form, determined by various contextual forces; that an ephemeral media can carve into something enduring, and that it is an object that represents the process by which it is made by its form and location. 

Regular writing, here, aims to achieve analogous attributes. How can lines of inquiry emerge out of the messy ebb-and-flow of my  experiences, media diet, and graduate program? How can a little bit of regular writing in a fleeting medium carve out useful and lasting language and concepts? And how can the archive of this writing capture the process of me trying to build ideas? 

I've been (finally) reading Dr Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's *The Mushroom At The End of the World* which, by my read, invests a lot its energy in generating or asserting language useful for making sense of the contemporary condition. I am inspired by this sensibility. All language embeds within it mental models, so I see the act of building language as intertwined in building a set of self-consistent, or at least of symbiotic (non-contradicting?) mental models. The book loops back on itself a lot, as I suspect I probably will, too. That's fine. Redundancy is necessary to build things that can stick, for myself or for you. 

The goal is to make manifest the values I want to see in the world. Writing for my friends is the most intuitive starting point to me. (Note: the tone of the newsletter will likely be that of a message for a friend I haven't spoken to in a while.) Please write back!! Conversation is crucial. Share with me things that resonate, things that don't, and anything in-between. 

Thanks for making the time,
Lukas