dear web spirit friends,

~this is guide.notes 16, a letter on tending your magical ecosystem on the internet~

this week, I started drawing two pages of what I intend to be a digital book about summer -- "too hot to hug" and "a single day without watermelon is a wasted day"

summer means it's too hot to hug — kening zhu

we do one finger hugs instead

a single day without watermelon is a wasted day — kening zhu

summer diaries — I pay myself in watermelon in order to endure this heat.

I kind of... started this project randomly; thinking of how I love to hate summer -- and yet, in reflecting on cyclical beings and seasonality from last week's letter, I can feel that it'll be over again soon, in a blink of an eye.

I've been so deep in business reincarnation work -- and web design client work -- that I have to make time and space to do other things, like:

• art (like water for my psyche)
• sleep (to the point of satiation)
• leisure (but what is leisure, anyway?)
• house admin (i'm really terrible at this...)
• friends (i love hermitting)

this week, I thought about shadow work -- by which I mostly mean -- psychic-shadow-illuminating work, and I made this drawing, and wrote a reflection on my process.

simple shadow work: a practice for psychic decluttering — kening zhu

a simple journaling practice for clearing space

then I zoomed out, and had a bird's eye view of all my ecosystems -- and how, basically for the last 8 years, I keep coming back to the same 3 practices -- wellbeing, creative practice, and art.

my core 3 practices: wellbeing, art, and business — kening zhu

an big picture overview of my 3 core themes and daily practices, these last 8 years, and how everything fits together.

I started thinking about how, true to cyclical logic, you don't "graduate" from wellbeing to creativity -- or from creativity to business. you go in iterative circles, again and again. even in my heightened entrepreneurial mood, I'm asking myself how I can get better sleep, or draw more pictures, or write more.

the other week, I read a lovely short book of fiction, and wrote down my notes on it.

reading notes | a concise chinese-english dictionary for lovers - by xiaolu guo — kening zhu

reading this felt like reading a translation of my life. a fresh, funny story for displaced souls

other things I'm thinking about

• art is a meditation, but business is an experiment. to get better at business, we need to be better at defining and running experiments. what are you testing for? what is the hypothesis / data / expected results / variables / control? what if you were to approach business with the scientific method (you know, the one we learned in high school!)
• the feeling of alignment is real feedback. especially as I've been learning about being a projector (human design) -- it's radically changed how I operate in my business.
• some people want websites as products -- like clickable, slick brochures -- but my personal philosophy is that a website is an environment. an ecosystem. a digital universe -- a way of channeling flow through your world, rather than just holding some text, image, and buttons.

thank you for sharing your inner seasons with me <3

I'm out of my zombie mood now, and fully living my inner summer.

that's all for this week, my friends. I'm wishing you many glorious summer days.
until next week,
kening