Introduction

Welcome to my corner of the dark forest.

I'm Ryan, an independent researcher and writer exploring new-old ways of connecting to nature, culture, and each other. This is my workshop for dissecting and reassembling ideas, practices, and media forms. Although it's a personal project currently, I'm interested in forming a sort of digital research library, like the Warburg Institute or Boston Athenaeum, with program areas and collaborating fellows but a bit more homespun/DIY.

My focus currently is Lectio Terra (Earth Reading), a series of species studies. Each week for one year, I am choosing one seasonally relevant plant, animal, landform, or other feature of the natural world. I collect a handful of readings and images drawn from disciplines such as botany, poetry, philosophy, geology, and the visual arts; and introduce them with a brief headnote combining cultural history, scientific information, and personal anecdotes.

The project emerges from my own practices of attention and curation, which riff on the devotional practice of lectio divina (“divine reading”), in which selected scriptures are slowly read and contemplated. By collecting a wide range of visual and textual materials, the posts evoke the mediated abundance of our relationship to nature while also drawing our cultural record into the moment of observing and encountering the world.

The Lectio Terra archive is currently available here. I am gradually shifting my activities to DFOS from other platforms.

Fig. 1. “Common mullein (Verbascum thapsus) with an associated moth and its anatomical segments.” Etching with watercolor. London: J. Curtis, 1831. From the Wellcome Collection.