So I designed a garden.
Being a fan of goth culture, I wanted something “strange but beautiful”. It would be mysterious and compelling, like Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, but not cartoony. A rock garden seemed like it would be easy to maintain, and I’d just been inspired by the garden of a professional, Katherine Vanbuskirk. I hired her and a few friends and started digging.
Building a garden was surprisingly fun, not at all like mowing our oversized lawn when I was a kid. Then I asked a dangerous question:
How could this be awesomer?
Well, how about interactivity? Like the computer games I used to make. Like museums that say “Please Touch”. Or gardens that say “Please Enter”.
So it would have a path that was open to the public. It needed more awesome, though.
The week I was pondering this, I scored preview tickets to the film, The Love Guru. It’s a vehicle for the comedian Mike Myers to pass along some philosophy on life. Reviewers and audiences hated it. But it inspired me. I have a philosophy too, and the urge to share it is something I can identify with. I’m always saying “I have a philosophy on that!” and rambling about it to whomever will listen, like my friend Joan Celebi, who is a life coach for parents of kids with special needs. She had been encouraging me to write an advice book, an impossibly vague project.
So I thought, okay, an interactive garden. With philosophy. And candles. And a shrine. And little cards, like PostSecret. But cooler. And I’ll write stuff on the back. And we’ll have tiki torches! And I’ll help people! What a Project! How awesome is that!!
