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I am sensing what the occasion can hold, and not overfilling it.
I am looking for some particular thing if I’m picking up my phone.
I am not letting frustration from one aspect of life be confused with frustration from another.
I am accepting of others’ interpretations and misinterpretations.
I am noticing when enough is enough.
🌻🌸 What it is How attentional cues work and what makes them different.
Salient Garden is a simple practice for participating more intentionally in everyday life.
The practice involves creating personal cues, or reminders of how you want to respond, act, and orient yourself in everyday situations. You write simple ongoing statements with beginnings like:
• “I am sensing...”
• “I am not letting...”
• “I am noticing...”
Then comes the fun part: you live with them, noticing how they naturally come to mind and provide guidance when the occasion calls for it.
Unlike affirmations, these don’t ask you to believe anything about yourself. They’re process-oriented reminders, small prompts to help guide coordination with the moment as it unfolds.
🌺💮 Where it comes from The origins of the practice and kindred ideas.
Salient Garden grew out of my own journaling and experimentation with patterns of thought, feeling, attention, and behavior. The practice is in conversation with ideas from process philosophy, Jungian psychology, Zen Buddhism, ecological conceptions of mind, and contemporary work on attention and habit formation.
The idea is simple: cultivate conditions that allow meaningful responses to emerge, rather than trying to control behavior or outcomes directly.
The writing of a cue is itself part of the practice. And because the cue is self-authored and arises from a real situation, it comes to mind naturally when you encounter a similar situation later. But it is also exciting and rewarding to discover how helpful a cue can be in contexts you never would have expected.
Salient Garden was developed by Robert Celedon-Scott. I began sharing the practice—and eventually building a web app—after friends and coworkers wanted to try this for themselves.
🌼🌷 A video introduction A brief walkthrough of the practice.
🪻🌻 Inspirations & resources Books, teachers, and projects that helped shape the garden.
• Iain McGilchrist · on attention, perception, and awareness
• Michael Levin · on cognition, agency, and collective intelligence
• James DeKorne’s I-Ching · a rich synthesis of interpretive traditions and symbolic systems
• Somatic Rituals · CAConrad’s action-attention training as poetry practice
• Sanshin Zen Community · Shōhaku Okumura on Uchiyama’s Opening the Hand of Thought
• Formscapes · Kehlan Morgan’s visual essays on process thought
• My writing · poems and prose-poems from everyday observation and participation
💮🌺 Get in touch How to connect.
Have you found some cues that are especially helpful to you? I’d love to see them.
Send them in, or tell me about your experience using any variation on this practice. Over time, I’d like to build a public collection of cues that others can draw from.
• My current cues · what I’m personally tending
Also, you don’t need an app. Come up with a few cues, write them down, and keep the paper somewhere—maybe your pocket. See what happens.