Genius Loci

I go by Cazimi. It means to be “in the heart of the sun.” When a planet conjoins the sun, it is empowered by pure light and potential. It’s the moment when something new is seeded.

There was something about blogging that I could never hold myself to, even though in theory I really enjoy the idea of it. The cycle would begin with me being ecstatic about a topic that I think I can go on forever about. I find a platform, set it up all cute, write an average of 3 entries, and completely abandon it. This circle of blogging life and death has occurred too many times to count. I had a fashion blog, a food blog, a personal blog, a photography blog, numerous other ones that I can’t quite remember (RIP), and they are all in their respective forgotten corners of the internet. I don’t visit their graves, I don’t even want them to exist due to the unholy self perception of cringe. Yet, I can’t remember the login info for them to truly wipe them from the world.

And then, I learned about digital gardens.

It’s a liberating, not so linear, not so narrow of an idea compared to blogging.

The concept of blogging was prickly to me somehow, but I wasn’t able to find out exactly why that was.

As it turned out, a large part of it was that I completely misconstrued what blogging even meant. In my perhaps naïve mind, people blogged about the things they are interested in — I truly thought everyone made blogs to share what they enjoyed, experienced, were engrossed in. But in reality, when I searched ‘how to blog,’ I was hit with a deluge of sloppily written, made for SEO posts about how to grow a blog in order to push affiliate links and eventually sell the whole thing off for a profit. Every article parroted the method of niching down, being consistent, and barraging every social media platform with updates. These pointers seemed so basic, but in all honesty, they were woefully opposite of how my brain liked to operate.

I wanted to explore more topics. I wanted to do it on my own time, and I sure as shit didn’t give a fuck about posting on social media. But somehow inadvertently, I had internalized what I’ve read about blogging, and started to write in a stiff, robotic manner. I narrowed the abundance of ideas into singular topics. I used SEO keywords as guide posts instead of writing freely. It was all a weird performative and pandering form of writing that I wasn’t even sure for whose eyes they were.

And as blog after blog withered and died, I took a long break to really just live life without feeling the need to try and narrate it in the most inoffensive way possible to some unknown entity. But the archivist in me just couldn’t let it go completely. I realized that I do enjoy writing about my experiences, I do like recording memories and making them pretty. And so I broke ground in yet another space.

The way this garden is organized probably doesn’t make much sense to anyone but astrology enthusiasts and me. Since the breadth of topics I want to cover encompasses anything and everything that’s of interest, I divided them up into 12 areas of life that corresponds to the 12 houses of astrology (but now with floral themes!) This is an imprecise, intuition based way of organizing that just feels right. But just in case any wayward souls wander into my garden and can’t make heads or tails of what’s going on, I have also included a master list of tags that can be utilized as a map of sorts.

This space will be constantly shifting and changing. I’ll start entries and maybe abandon them halfway. Some areas will flourish while others lay empty for some time. That’s ok, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can go as fast or slow as I like. There are no rules here.