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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.
Users create personal cues—reminders of how they’d like to act, respond, and orient themselves—and then notice as the cues provide guidance in real situations over time. Rather than tracking tasks, goals, or streaks, the garden records moments when a cue becomes salient—when the occasion calls for it and it naturally comes to mind.
• “I am sensing...”
• “I am not letting...”
• “I am noticing...”
Unlike affirmations, these cues do not ask you to believe something about yourself. Instead, they are written as process-oriented reminders in the first-person present tense, to support coordination with the present moment as it unfolds.
🌺💮 Where it comes from The origins of the practice and ideas it draws upon.
This practice has grown out of daily journaling and active experimentation with patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior, in conversation with ideas from Whiteheadian process philosophy, Jungian psychology, Zen Buddhism, Fourth Way, ecological approaches to mind, and contemporary work on attention and habit formation.
Rather than trying to control behavior or outcomes directly, the aim is to create conditions which allow meaningful responses to naturally emerge.
The act of writing the cues is itself part of the practice. Because they are self-authored, they tend to remain closely connected to the situations and patterns from which they arise. Often, they prove just as salient in other surprising contexts as well.
Salient Garden was developed by Robert Celedon-Scott. The idea of sharing the practice—and eventually building a web app—emerged through conversations with friends and coworkers who wanted to try it 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 the relationship between awareness and experience
• Michael Levin · on developmental biology, 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, systems, and meaning
• My writing · poems and prose-poems exploring everyday participation and perception
💮🌺 Get in touch Ways to connect, share cues, and explore examples.
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 public cue repository others can draw inspiration from.
• My current cues · what I’m personally tending
Also, if you don’t want a new reason to spend time on your phone or computer, try coming up with a few cues and writing them down by hand. Keep the paper somewhere—maybe your pocket. I think you’ll be surprised how effective taking just that step can be.