About
🌻🌸 What it is.
Salient Garden is a simple practice for cultivating attention. Users create brief attentional cues—reminders of ways they’d like to participate in daily life—and then record which cues prove helpful over time. Rather than tracking tasks, goals, or streaks, the garden collects moments of recognition: noticing when a cue becomes practically relevant and allowing it to guide action.
• “I am sensing...”
• “I am noticing...”
• “I am looking for...”
Unlike affirmations, these Salient Garden-style cues do not ask you to believe something about yourself. Instead, they are written as process-oriented reminders (in first-person present tense) to gently guide attention into coordination with the present moment.
🌺💮 Where it comes from.
The project emerged from many years of teaching, writing, and daily experimentation with attending to recurring patterns in thought, feeling, and behavior. It draws inspiration from my personal writing practice and resonates with ideas from Whiteheadian process philosophy, Iain McGilchrist, Jung, Gurdjieff, Zen Buddhism, ecological views of mind, and contemporary work on attention and habit formation.
Rather than attempting to control outcomes or behavior directly, it helps create conditions in which meaningful responses can naturally emerge.
Salient Garden was created by Robert Celedon-Scott as an experiment in personal attention ecology. The idea of sharing the practice—and eventually creating a simple web app—emerged through conversations with friends and coworkers who wanted to try it for themselves.
🌼🌷 A brief introduction to the interface.
(coming soon.)
🪻🌻 Inspirations & other relevant resources.
• Iain McGilchrist · on attention, perception, and the relationship between awareness and experience
• Michael Levin · on developmental biology, cognition, agency, and collective intelligence
• James DeKorne’s I-Ching · a remarkable synthesis of many interpretive traditions
• Somatic Rituals · CAConrad’s action-attention training as poetry practice
• Denis Noble · with Andrea Morris, on agency and causation in complex living systems
• Footnotes2Plato · Matthew David Segall’s process-relational philosophy, metaphysics, and cosmology
• Formscapes · Kehlan Morgan’s visual essays exploring process thought, systems, and meaning
• My writing · poems and prose exploring everyday attention, relation, and emergence
💮🌺 Get in touch.
Do you have cues that’ve been especially helpful to you? I’d love to see them! Send them in, or let me know about your experience using a system like this. Over time, I’d like to assemble a repository of public cues that others can draw from for their own gardens.
• My current cues · what I’m personally tending
Also, if you don’t want another reason to spend time on your phone or computer, try coming up with and writing down a few cues. Keep the paper somewhere—maybe your pocket. I think you’ll be surprised how effective taking just that step can be.