The laptop is warm against my chest. October in Calgary, and I’ve got the window cracked because my anxiety needs air, even cooling into evening. My wooden desk—rough grain, two hundred small scratches from pens and coffee cups and the pressure of years, beside my Thunderbird necklace inherited from my grandfather beside it—holds everything I need right now. The laptop, a handwritten notebook (paper, because good thoughts refuse to live digitally), a mug of cooling decaf coffee, and my hands.

Foam and the Wooden Desk: How Ideas Live in Systems and in Hands

My hands know the difference between this desk and the rest of the world. The texture of the wood grain. They’ve typed 1,051,693 words across fourteen years. My hands write careful ceremonies and Queer theory and the specific terror of 3 AM panic into existence. Knowing things my brain hasn’t caught up to yet.

The question is how do I make those hands knowable to anyone else? How do I take what lives in my body, in this desk, in this particular October light falling through my Calgary window, and transform into something worth sharing?

The answer lives in systems. Not the glamorous kind. The unglamorous, technical kind which most writers never talk about because it contradicts the romantic notion of inspiration.

People imagine ideas arriving fully formed. A bolt of inspiration. The muse descending. That’s not what happens.

750 words. Not every day—expectation sets traps. But consistently. Over fourteen years. Since I was fifteen years old, I started writing on 750words.com, and though I’ve cycled through periods of daily devotion and months of abandonment, I’ve landed on a sustainable rhythm that doesn’t punish me for missing days. The practice is simple: open the file, set a loose intention, and write until something true arrives. No editing. No self-consciousness. No deleting. If I run out of things to say, I write “I don’t know what to write” until something emerges.

The files accumulate. Over 1,051,693 words since 2011. Maybe an intimidating amount of raw material, but only 10% of those words are ever meant for publication. The rest is processing. Thinking out loud. The internal monologue typed frantically at midnight.

Journals are laboratories of consciousness. Places where I experiment with voice, work through ideas, document the daily texture of existence that forms the bedrock of meaningful writing.

But that 10%? That’s where the literary journalism comes from.

Ideas arrive as fragments. Incomplete. Often contradictory. My anxiety manifests in my hands as tremor. I think of Indigenous healing systems rejecting mind/body dualism. Indigenous epistemologies, particularly those in North America, often emphasize a relational ontology that views the mind, body, and spirit as inseparable and interconnected with the land and community. A mechanical keyboard sounds like thinking. The prairie is a palimpsest—a landscape where new narratives are superimposed over the traces of preceding histories, a concept often used in the study of Canadian Prairie literature. Sarah Ahmed writes about disorientation as method in her book Queer Phenomenology. These aren’t ideas yet, but pieces of felt experience, research encounters, moments of noticing that have nowhere to live except the chaos of my daily writing practice.

For years, I let them stay scattered. I’d write them into my journal and then they’d disappear into the archive. I’d encounter the same thought again six months later unrecognizable and forgotten. I’d make the same connection independently, thinking it was new, when really it was something I’d already half-thought but never externalized.

I was losing my own thinking.

The mining process, what I call “the sort,” happens every Monday morning. I read back through the previous week’s writing looking for fragments that have the texture of publishable insight. Not the most polished fragments. Not the most coherent. But the ones that carry what I think of as “recognizable truth,” moments where I’ve articulated something that feels both specific to my experience and somehow universally resonant.

I move these fragments into a separate document. Currently it holds 47 potential pieces, ranging from half-finished thoughts to nearly-complete arguments. The act of mining matters. It prevents me from staring at a blank page wondering what to write. Instead, I’m asking: which of these fragments is ready? Which one has been building pressure in my brain for days? Which conversation do I keep returning to?

The laptop presses against my ribs. Outside, the Calgary wind picks up the way it does in October. Prairie wind that cuts through layers. I can hear it but not see it, which is the problem I’ve been trying to solve for months. How to make the invisible visible, how to catch the thinking that happens at the edges of consciousness and give it shape.

Foam doesn’t look like much. It’s markdown files in VS Code, a text editor most programmers use but most writers haven’t heard of. The software is almost invisible. What matters is the structure.

I start with atomic notes. Single ideas per file. Not summaries. Not essays. Thoughts small enough to hold entire in my head. This is the core principle of the Zettelkasten method, and it is a practice shared by many in the digital gardening community who have adopted Foam, often using it to build a “second brain” for knowledge management. Thoughts small enough to hold entire in my head:

• ”Anxiety manifests in my hands”
• ”epistemology rejecting mind/body dualism”
• ”Why mechanical keyboards feel like thinking”
• ”The prairie as palimpsest”
• ”Sarah Ahmed on disorientation as method” Each note is a bubble. Contained. Specific. Boundaried.

Then I connect them using [[double bracket syntax]]. Not hierarchy. Not “this file contains that file.” Relationship. Lateral connection. I write a note called “My particular brand of Queer anxiety” and I link it with [[anxiety-in-hands]]and [[Queer-embodiment]] and [[medication-side-effects]]. Links don’t imply subordination, instead these ideas talk to each other. They’re peers.

This approach is directly inspired by the Zettelkasten method (“slip-box”) method, a system of personal knowledge management developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, who used it to write over 70 books and hundreds of articles. The Zettelkasten is built on the principle of atomic notes and hypertextual linking to create a web of thoughts, making it the philosophical ancestor of modern digital gardening tools like Foam.

When I open the graph visualization, a feature that shows every note as a node and every link as a connection, there’s no pyramid. I see a constellation. My anxiety writing clusters with my research on embodiment but also threads outward to technology, to prairie ecology, to Indigenous knowledge systems. The connections were always there. The system just makes them visible. This transition from a private, fragmented archive to a public, interconnected garden is a common theme for Foam users, who often discuss how the tool allows them to migrate their “digital garden” and “learn in public” by sharing their web of thoughts.

The backlinking is where revelation happens. Foam automatically discovers connections between notes, showing which other notes reference the currently active note. I’m working on a piece about Indigenous literature and literary gatekeeping when suddenly Foam surfaces something I’d forgotten, how months ago I wrote about settler colonialism and displacement, and I’d linked it to my anxiety writing, and those two threads connect through my research on geographic sovereignty. I didn’t consciously make that connection. My hands knew it. My thinking knew it. I couldn’t see it until the system showed me.

You’re writing about embodiment and suddenly you see, oh, this appears in my anxiety research, and my Queer space-making notes, and my work on Indigenous healing. The system didn’t know those connections when I wrote them. It discovered them. Made them explicit.

An expansion is not a fragment. I’ve been thinking about why my Apple Watch thinks I’m dying when I write poetry is a fragment. It’s maybe 200 words, an observation without architecture. An article is that observation plus research, context, examples, and the weird circular path back to where it started.

This is where I spend most of my energy, expanding fragments into complete thoughts. I start by asking three questions:

1. What’s the core insight? Not the hook or the clever opening, but the actual thing I’m trying to say. The essential truth underneath.
2. What does the reader need to understand first? What context, research, or definition makes sense of this insight? What scaffolding needs to be in place?
3. How does this connect to something bigger? This is the moment where a personal observation becomes cultural commentary. The Apple Watch isn’t about my anxiety, rather the idea is how technology mediates our understanding of our own bodies, how quantification shapes experience, how the digital world enforces mind/body separation.

Once I have those three elements, the structure reveals itself. Opening scene (sensory, specific). Context and research. Personal experience that illustrates the problem. Broader implications. Closing that loops back to the opening with new understanding.

The expansion happens in layers. First draft is rough. I follow the outline but don’t worry about elegance. I cite sources in brackets [Author, Year], include the research that supports my thinking, plant my personal anecdotes where they do actual work. Second pass, I smooth transitions, cut repetition, make sure the voice sounds like me. Third pass, I verify citations, check facts, read aloud to catch awkward phrasing. Total time: 2–3 hours per piece. Some take longer when I’m wrestling with something complex or personal.

I lean back from the desk. The laptop is warm now. I set it aside carefully on the wooden surface and pick up my handwritten notebook instead. The system can’t capture the way an idea feels in my hands before it becomes language. Hesitation. Crossing-out. Physical resistance of pen on paper when I’m trying to articulate something true.

The Western Mind vs. Everything Else

Western knowledge organization is obsessed with hierarchy. The Great Chain of Being, a concept that dominated Western thought from the Middle Ages, is the classic example of this obsession. A hierarchical structure of all matter and life, positing a fixed order of superiority and inferiority. This linear, top-down approach is also reflected in the Western worldview’s perception of time, which is usually linearly structured and future-orientated. The outline. The file folder nested inside the file folder nested inside another file folder. Subject → Category → Subcategory. You impose order from the top down, descending.

It made sense for libraries. For bureaucracy. For organizing physical objects that can only exist in one place at a time. But that’s not how thinking works. That’s not how knowledge actually lives in a body, or in a culture, or in a life.

When I’m researching Indigenous sovereignty, I simultaneously need academic theory (but not as “superior” to other ways of knowing), personal experience (but not as merely “anecdotal”), poetry and metaphor (but not as “decorative”), community knowledge (but not as “folklore”), scientific research (but not as the “final word”). Woven. Lateral. Each one informs the others. Cut one thread and the whole thing changes shape.

A traditional note-taking system forces you to choose: is this academic content or personal reflection or cultural context? Where does it belong? The system demands you make it fit into predetermined categories. You’re forced to decide what something is before you understand what it means.

Foam asks where else does this connect? Mirroring a tenet of Indigenous relationality, which is often described as a commitment to an ethic of relationships extending beyond the human to the non-human world.

The wind rattles the window. I’ve left it open too long, and the room is cooling. But moving my body right now feels like it would interrupt something necessary. So I sit in the cooling room with my hands on the wooden desk and I think about how the Elders I’ve met never organized knowledge into categories, but through relationship.

I’d hear stories about the plants and the animals and how they were connected, not as a metaphor but as actual structural principle. The knowledge wasn’t stored as separate pieces, but existed in relationship. You couldn’t understand one thing without understanding its connection to everything else. Knowledge is relational by design. Everything spoke to everything else.

That’s not linear. That’s lateral. Rhizomatic. The way Foam structures information. This is a direct echo of the philosophical concept of the rhizome developed by Deleuze and Guattari, which describes a non-hierarchical, acentered, and perpetually connecting network

This isn’t coincidence. Western note-taking systems are built on Western epistemology. The assumption that knowledge can be organized hierarchically. Separating different types of knowledge into different categories. Privileging the linear, the singular, and the definitive.

Foam’s structure aligns more with epistemologies that never separated those things. With ways of thinking where everything is connected, where different types of knowledge inhabit the same space, where understanding happens through relationship rather than category. This relational approach is central to Indigenous Knowledge Systems, where knowledge is often situated in relationship to a specific location, experience, and group of people rather than being an abstract, universal truth. Indeed, studies on Indigenous Knowledge Organization have found a preference for non-hierarchical and less linear structures than what current mainstream classification systems provide.

Getting Into the Weeds: The Actual Workflow

My Foam workspace has several anchor systems, and explaining them is important because people often ask isn’t this too complicated? Won’t it take too much time?

Yes and no.

The Daily Note is an inbox. Thoughts arrive throughout the day. I capture ideas in a date-based file. A holding place. Later, I process them into the permanent graph.

The Evergreen Notes are the permanent residents. Notes on concepts that don’t change: “anxiety,” “queer embodiment,” “Indigenous epistemology,” “prairie ecology.” I return to these constantly and they accumulate links. The connection density shows what matters most in my actual thinking versus what I imagine matters.

The Literature Nodes are specific. Every book I’m reading gets a note. Not a summary—summaries are useless. Specific passages. Specific connections. When I link [[Ahmed on disorientation]]into my writing about queer space-making, the system shows, oh, I’ve connected Ahmed to five other pieces. Here’s what else I was thinking about when I was reading Ahmed. Here’s the context that makes this reference meaningful.

The Orphan and Placeholder Reviews are the maintenance work nobody talks about. Foam can identify orphan notes (notes with no connections) and dead links (wikilinks to notes that don’t exist yet). Orphans are usually mistakes or outdated thinking. I review them regularly and either connect them back into the network or recognize them as dead ends worth abandoning. The dead links show gaps in my thinking, places where I’ve referenced something I haven’t articulated yet.

The Publish Setup allows me to publish to GitHub Pages with minimal configuration or to any web hosting platform like Netlify or Vercel. My actual published canon lives there: a public-facing selection of my strongest writing, with the connections visible. Readers can click through the same lateral system I use privately.

This is the unsexy part of having a knowledge system. Not the revelation. The maintenance. The regular work of deciding what stays and what goes.

I get up and close the window. The room is too cold now. When I sit back down, I notice the scratch on the desk where I once pressed too hard with a pen, trying to think through something difficult. The mark is still visible. I run my hand over it—the wood is rough there—and I think about how ideas also leave marks. How the thinking you do changes the surface you’re thinking on, even if nobody else can see it.

As I build a body of writing for Medium, Foam becomes increasingly valuable. Not for organization. For revelation.

I write 750 words daily in 750words.com. I capture raw thought. Some percentage becomes medium-length essays or full literary journalism. But the connections between pieces is where the work happens.

When I’m researching a piece on Indigenous literature and literary gatekeeping, Foam shows me you’ve already explored this through your anxiety writing. You’ve already connected this to your work on Queer space-making. Here’s where your thinking has been latent. Here’s where you need to be more explicit. Here’s where you’re actually saying something nobody else is saying, because this particular combination of connections only exists in this particular mind shaped by this particular culture and geography and body.

The lateral structure prevents fragmentation. It forces integration. It ensures my work stays connected to my actual thinking rather than breaking into disconnected pieces. It means that my Wednesday investigation pieces aren’t isolated from my Monday process posts, aren’t separate from my Friday craft essays. Instead, they all exist in relation to each other, the way ideas actually exist in the body and in culture.

I save the document and close the laptop. The wooden desk is suddenly empty except for the notebook and the cooling mug of tea and my hands. Outside, Calgary’s October is darkening into evening. Winds have calmed.

Tomorrow I’ll open Foam again and see what connections the night has revealed. I’ll sit at this desk and let my hands find their way through the language. I’ll look for the ideas that are trying to become visible, the thoughts that have been waiting in the lattice of my own writing, the connections that only exist because I’ve learned to build systems that honour lateral thinking instead of forcing it into hierarchies.

The wooden desk will still be here. My hands will still know its texture. And somewhere in the infrastructure—in the markdown files and the wikilinks and the graph visualization showing constellations of thought. Another pattern will emerge, waiting to be seen, waiting to be heard.

Originally posted here.