botanical studies ep. 01: hello friend, welcome

 

I finally finished the first episode of botanical studies — as mostly an introduction and exploration of themes in the title.

  • 🌱 botanical -- plant life as a metaphor for creation

  • 🪁 studies -- a way of curiosity, growth, and discovery

  • 🏕 internet -- a space to inhabit, build, and be

  • 🪼 magic -- the power of energetics and creativity

hopefully this will be an intimate, weekly thing.

 

*

read the text

hi friends, welcome.

this is kening. I’m an artist, creative guide, and architect-builder-gardener of digital worlds on the internet.

I’ve been intending to start a podcast for many years - about everything I’ve been working on, figuring out, obsessing over for the last decade of my life.

I’m talking about the minute, day by day process of committing to the creative life, and what it means to be an artist in the digital age. how to make art and make money — so that making art is sustainable in our material world. how to build a business on the internet — in a way that feels good to the soul: nourishing, empowering, intuitive, inspiring, expansive. how to sense into a vision — a purpose that matters — and chase it, with all of my fire, to the end.

these are all ongoing questions I’ve been asking myself every single day. and I’m not starting a podcast now, after nine years, because I have the right answers for you. I have processes, suggestions, ideas, rituals, experiments, discoveries, possibilities, and many, many more questions. questions that feel like compasses for the heart and intuition, which, in this very difficult, pathless path that I — and perhaps you — have chosen, could help us find our own way.


but, why now?

I think I’m finally ready to speak to you, my creative friends, because I’m in a moment of deep integration in my own practices — in art, business, and the intuitive lif. recently, I’ve been learning to dance more fluidly between what once felt like diametric opposites:

structure vs. flow
art vs. money
solitude vs. community
feminine vs. masculine
linear vs. cyclical
work vs. rest
stillness vs. movement
creating vs. consuming
commitment vs. freedom
being vs. doing

in my own ongoing explorations, part of the creative act of life, I’ve found, is expanding the vessel of the self. to see non-duality in these forces that have tension. to become bigger, more elastic, and invite in the feeling of constant possibility.

so, this will be a podcast — or maybe, more accuruately, an unfolding audio experiment — that plays with the boundaries of form and practice; that feels the most fertile in liminal spaces of the psyche.

it will be about art. and business. and money. and the intuitive life. it will be about growing ecosystems and worlds — on the internet that can nourish our souls, our creativity, and our material wellbeing.

*

there’s something about a podcast that feels so intimate, so sacred. so, I want to say thank you. so much, for listening. for inviting me into your ears, whereever you are now in the world, as you go about your day.

*

so, today, I want to talk to you about the title I choose for this podcast, and why it feels like a magical thread that connects and integrates, well, everything I want to share with you.

-

botanical studies of internet magic

this title actually came to me, more or less fully formed — last summer — but I want to explore out loud with you, the meanings, connotations, and philosophies behind each word.

I’ll start by saying — that, in parallel with my own journey of growing into myself as an artist-entrepeneur, I’ve always struggled with finding a sense of home and belonging in my environment.

I’m telling you this because it sort of explains why I choose the title of this podcast — and why I’m structuring the spine of my body of work — as centered around… the internet.

because for me, the internet, isn’t just a tool or technology I use.

the internet is a place.

not just any place. it’s a home I made for my creativity. a world that holds me.

it’s an environment I experience, and an environment I create.

I’ll get into that more, but let’s rewind. and start at the beginning. with the word botanical.


botanical

botanical is a metaphor for how I approach creation — in both art and business — and sharing it on the internet. it is the study of both intentional cultivation and wilderness or wildness. it reminds me to do the daily work of tending, and to surrender. leave it alone. to trust in the power of seeds that sprout more seeds.

  • botanical = plant life — the study of living, growing, green things. freshness. lushness. soul-giving.

  • aliveness — of spirit, of creations, of being alive and human

  • time — plant time — their cyclical phases. their waking and hibernation rhythms, attunment to seasonality. nonlinear.

  • slowness — requiring an act of daily care, and presence.

  • diversity - is what creates richness in a botanical world

  • nurturing — as a reciprocal relationship

  • growth — as a single seed (that contains more seeds) —> to a garden, a jungle, an ecosystem.

  • ecosystem — interconnectedness and interdependence of things

  • process

  • surrender — you water the plant, but then, you leave it alone.



studies

studies encapsulates my ethos for approaching all the hard, necessary, critical questions in life — the questions you can’t just google because they are no answers, only processes, only a journey. studies isn’t about memorizing knowledge, but embodying a way of being.

  • “botanist of your own psyche” — as self-study

  • art is a study, business is a study, money is a study, building on the web is a study, relationships are studies

  • the practice of studying —

  • gathering research

  • observation - noticing, seeing

  • presence - listening, attuning, sensing

  • experimentation & play

  • inspiration

  • discovery

  • integration


when I approach hard things as studies — I’m filled with curiosity and discovery.


internet

  • by internet, I’m referring to the world wide web, composed of the seemingly infinite abyss of boundless, interconnected, nested worlds — called websites.

  • the internet is like an expanding universe, and each website is like a world in itself. some websites exist in galaxies, or clustered. others are lonely stars.

  • it took me a long time to reframe how I thought of the internet - to see that the web wasn’t just a tool or medium to help me share my work so that I could achieve X goal — getting seen, getting published, getting hired, getting clients, getting customers, getting money — the internet was an end in itself. or, it could be.

  • whereas most sites are a means to an end — a carefully optimized sequencing of information, templated, sanitized in this capitalist-consumerist world, designed to make you click and buy —

  • I want to re-envision a different kind of internet — one of experiencing worlds of the mind and imagination

  • a website is a world that mirrors your mind, made public

  • the internet a mirror of our collective consciousness

  • a space for infinite possibility — a place we can make more beautiful, more fun, more inhabitable, more pleasurable, more generous, more spacious.

  • you have power.


magic

  • magic is how I want to approach all the work I do —

  • magic is effortless, sourced from beyond

  • requiring surrender

  • magic is enchanting, liminal, transportive, deep

  • magic is what’s possible when we align our fertile, creative energy with our values, and the force of our fire

  • magic as play and possibility

  • energetics

  • expansiveness of the spirit

  • in the age of AI and data-driven everything, what makes us uniquely human is what makes us magical — the unquantifiable, the felt, the sensed, the intuitive, the kinds of creativity that cannot be derived

  • in a world of product, process is magic



intertwining all the threads

  • botanical beings are magical — your creations, your threads of inspiration, your idea-seeds, your digital gardens.

  • to devote yourself to studying (art, business, intuition) is an act of inner alchemy and transformation.

  • magic is a process you can embody — to be guided by intuition, and ritual

  • the internet can be a place hold delightful, magical ecosystems, because we have the power to build it, to grow it, one seed at a time.


each word feels like an endless thread that we can keep unspooling, but I’ll leave it here, now.

thank you for listening to this first episode.

you can find me on my website-world, keningzhu.com.

I’ll be back to speak to you again, next week. until soon.

 
podcast, growing a business, creative practiceKening Zhudigital ecosystem, podcast episode