Hello! 👋🏻 My name is Brenden Harrell. I am a Husband, Father, Lutheran Pastor, and Tinkerer.
You have stubbled upon an experiment of mine. I have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the exhausting, overwhelming and overstimulating digital spaces we inhabit. Content is constantly being pushed, or marketed, to us in new shiny wrappers. Why not try something different?
My hope is that this site will be more like a little quiet wilderness. A place to slow down, explore, start conversations, and collaborate. That is why I have named it - The Aspen Grove.
The Calm after the Storm
Aspen trees never used to mean much to me. I’d look out into the forest and see an unformed mass of green and brown. Until one day, a memory was frozen into my brain.
I was sixteen - old enough to be confident I understood the world - and young enough to believe it.
I was on the epic adventure of boy scouting: backpacking in the back country of New Mexico. We hiked up and down the mountains of the Philmont reservation carrying everything we needed on our backs. On this particular day, we had hiked from the early light of dawn until the trees turned into vague pillars passing by. As we arrived at our campsite for the night, the last rays of sun slipped behind the mountain. Flashlights bobbed and dropped as we fumbled to set up out tents in the dark. The fumbling increased in fervor as a cool stormy breeze began to blow. The exhausted frantic shuffle ensued as one by one tents took shape before the coming rain. I remember zipping my tent’s door right as a boom of thunder echoed against the mountain’s heavy sides. That night can only be described as breath taking. The rush of the rain and the whipping of the trees was only drowned out by deep rumbles of the ground beneath me.
To my surprise, I woke the next morning to the soft bubble of a stream. I hadn’t noticed it the night before. As I emerged from my little burrow, I stepped into the middle of a perfectly untouched aspen grove. The calm completely captivated me. Cream trunks surrounded us in every direction with the little creek winding its way past. The light softly filtered through bright green leaves as if the storm the night before was only a dream.
At that moment, aspen trees began to mean something to me. But the amazing thing about aspens is that no aspen is alone. Under the surface, all those individual trees are growing together as one. Each connected to the other by the roots. When I learned that, the image of that night only became that much richer.
Connected by the Roots
Just like that aspen grove with its calm yet vivid existence, I aim to make this digital space a grove of sorts. A collection of thoughts, ideas, concepts, notes and experiences.
It’s a little like a blog, but also very different. The basic concept of this site was inspired by the idea of Digital Gardening. The main idea is to create a place to plant ideas and let them grow gradually. Rather than posting content that gets sent off into the torrent of data around us, a garden looks at a note as something meant to be revisited, edited and expanded.
In other words, this is not a chronological feed of writings, but is a living network of notes I have gathered and continue to write about things that I find interesting and useful.
I think the reason this concept resonates with me is that it mirrors my lived experience of thinking and developing ideas. No idea is at its best the first time you scribble it down. But over time a small idea can grow into something powerful.
Therefore the nature of this garden can be summarized with the following points:
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No note is finished: This follows The Iterative Nature of Learning. I have added clues to the start of notes to help you see how I view them and if I have put much work into them or not. You can find more details about this here: The Organization of My Digital Garden
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Notes are interconnected: This allows for Topological Navigation by using links that connect related ideas together. This creates a kind of map that allows for navigation around the garden by following paths of ideas. You can think of this a lot like going for a physical walk in a garden.
By structuring this site according to these concepts, I hope to explore a different way of “Being” in digital space.
Christian Collaboration
Another motivation for this site is the fact that Pastors and churches have a hard time collaborating in meaningful and open ways. Sure there are Christian colleges, Seminaries and even conferences all aimed at the sharing of knowledge and practice. But all of these forums are structured within an expert to student relationship. We have precious few methods to exchange and collaborate on ideas in a long term or sustained way between churches and her leaders.
We often get stuck in The Packaging Trap. Rather than opening conversations, we tend to get caught up in marketing a new curriculum, or book, or journal. All of these forms of idea sharing are good in their own right, but tend to lean toward encouraging copy and pasting ideas into a new context. We all know this does not work. Curriculums often end up being more work than just doing something yourself most of the time. They also tend to elevate the writer or producer of a curriculum above the “users” of the material. There is no mutual exchange or relationship.
So the desire of this garden is to be a space to explore collaboration that is more fluid and immediately useful for myself, but also to visitors who use this garden as a resource. I am just as fallible as any other human, keeping track of notes and ideas like this make that even more apparent. But it also allows learning to be more intentional and open. Every note you read is in need of refinement, challenging, application, and improvement. All of which are tasks much better suited to a community, than an individual working in isolation.
I have nothing to sell or package or advertised, these are simply the contents of my thinking and study. They are useful to me and maybe will be useful to someone else too.
How to Use this Garden
Here are some basic notes about how you could use this garden:
- Follow a path of ideas by clicking on imbedded links as you read. See where my mind has wandered and where yours might too.
- Use the search bar to see if I have notes on something specific. If not you could email me and see what I think!
- Look at a particular note tag and see what other notes have the same tag.
- If you run into a 404 page it means I haven’t made that note yet or haven’t uploaded it. If it is interesting to you reach out to me and start a conversation about it.
🏞 Trailheads
Good places to start a walk through this garden:
Sacred Space, Liturgy and Rhythm
Stuff about worship and Christian living:
Discipleship, Faith Formation and Pedagogy
Stuff about learning and growing as a community:
Human and Faith Centered Tech
Stuff about how we should use and think about tech:
Projects
Stuff I have built or am working on.