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When I was first ruminating on what a flower is not a flower meant to me, I was having a lot of trouble pinpointing that feeling. It was like a tip of the tongue situation. The concept felt overwhelming and all-encompassing. I started to jot down little fragments and sentences on things that reminded me of this feeling, or things that just tickled my brain and expanded my capacity to think beyond. Many of these ideas came up from readings, some from conversations with friends. A few ended up blossoming into projects, while others just stayed as interesting threads to tug at on occasion.

Here are 44 notes on emergence:

1. A flower is not a flower. “It is made only of non-flower elements—sunshine, clouds, time, space, earth, minerals, gardeners, and so on. A true flower contains the whole universe. If we return any one of these non-flower elements to its source, there will be no flower,” says Thich Nhat Hanh.
2. A school of fish, a manifestation of structure in the open sea. There is no hierarchy, they move as a unit, a mega-organism.
3. Hyperpop, a genre beyond genres, as it deconstructs pop music and popular music, it creates the sound of the future, a future without boundaries, borders, or structure…a future with possibilities, fluidity, and dynamicism.
4. There is no original without the copy. What is an original that no one can access? What is the reverence of an original, but an acknowledgment of the impact of the many copies in circulation?
5. The printer: a portal that transforms digital pixels to tangible ink, a bridge between the virtual and the real. Is the real version the digital creation or the printed product? Perhaps it’s the act of printing, the process in which both versions simultaneously exist?
6. The fullness found in emptiness—the delight of browsing for new pens and pencils at the stationary store, the excitement at opening up a new journal or notebook and plotting out how it will be filled. There’s an optimism to how stationary will be used to jot down thoughts, document knowledge, chart progression, and beyond. Often, the actual scribbles fall short of the initial plans. Yet, instead of dismissing this initial energy as foolish optimism or seeing the results as a short-coming, perhaps it’s worthwhile to understand the initial fullness as something complete in of itself.
7. Mushrooms creating life out of death, complicating the popular notion of a linear birth-to-death line and creating a loop instead.
8. On Paprika, the merging of dreams and ideas of collective consciousness, is our society not a construction of our collective dreams, the ideas and concepts that swim in our subconscious?
9. When a surfer rides a wave, they are embracing the climax and last moments of that wave before it splashes back into the larger sea. By embracing the inevitability of death, to accept the things that are outside the control of the individual, a new agency is born. A surfer can’t ride against the wave, by learning the rhythm of the water and going with it, they’re able to unlock something all-together new, something only possible in collaboration.
10. The logarithmic spiral that forms the shell of a nautilus, one of the oldest living life forms, is the same spiral as the one in the galaxy it lives in.
11. A biker carrying their bike, a reversal of roles. A skateboarder carrying their board, a reversal of roles.
12. Popular phrase from the labor strikes and protests in France during 1968 (May 68), “Soyez réalistes, demandez l’impossible.” Be realistic, demand the impossible.
13. Utopia from Greek: u-topia, no place. But instead of letting that indicate utopia as an impossibility, that there is no place like utopia, let it be the guide. There is no place like utopia because utopia is not a place. An ideal community would be something amorphous, fluid, liminal. Utopia is the pursuit of utopia, for a destination indicates a finality to something that is boundless, a static end for a dynamic reality.
14. Some infinities are larger than others, such as the uncountable infinity of a set between 0 and 1 (0.231…, 0.491… , 0.593…) in comparison to a countable set of integers from 0 to infinity (0, 1, 2, 3…), as proven by Cantor’s diagonal argument.
15. “Elmo’s Song”, a song in which not only are the lyrics just referencing said song, but also offering the instructions for others to make their own versions, “Big Bird’s Song”, etc.
16. Internet as a network of networks.
17. Landback not as a transfer of ownership, a Euro-centric view of land and space, but a call to guardianship or custodianship.
18. In Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman, knowing that he is dying, Superman wants to determine whether a world without Superman and superheroes can survive and thrive, so he creates Earth Q inside of an infant universe. Earth Q is our—the reader’s—reality, and since the infant universe is developing at a hyper-accelerated rate, our time of existence is within the timespan of theAll-Star Superman series (Thus the end of the series—and Superman—would be many billion of years from our reality).
19. Hyperlinking as a way to mix form with content, instead of: “There are many kinds of fruit (such as apples, oranges and bananas).” and applying hyperlinks to the words fruit, apples, oranges, and bananas. The sentence can be: “There are many kinds of fruit.” and applying hyperlinks to the words: many, kinds, of, and fruit.
20. The Chinese character for eternal (永) contains all 8 basic strokes used in Chinese written language, and also contains the radical of water (水).
21. There are likely thousand of trillions of bristlemouth fish, making them the most abundant of vertebrate.
22. In the Outkast song, “Hey Ya!,” the jubilant tone and production overpowering the doubt and skepticism on love in the lyrics, perhaps best captured in Andre 3000 murmuring “Y’all don’t wanna hear me, you just wanna dance,” as the chorus of “Hey Ya”’s come in.
23. Advertising as a way to sell the future, by leaning into the past, as a way to distract people from the present. Using nostalgia, and historical power (ideas of legacy, tradition, lineage) to sell as daydreams for the future, to the consumer—often people without said centralized power.
24. Carcinisation, the process of convergent evolution in which many unrelated crustaceans evolve into a similar crab-like shape.
25. During game development, Sonic's default speed was set to that of Mario while running.
26. “A video game is half-real: we play by real rules while imagining a fictional world.”
27. Free Jazz: jazz improvisation with no rules, breaking from traditions of fixed harmonic structure.
28. Some swordfish species can increase the blood supply and heat to their brain and eyes, which increases their temporal perception rate.
29. Mass affects space and time, and a large mass slows down time in its vicinity, “things fall downward because, down there, time is slowed by the Earth.” Time is slower on the plains than on a mountain.
30. There is a different time at every point in space. “There is not a single time, there is a vast multitude of them.”
31. We are all travelers traversing spacetime, even being in one place, we are traveling in time.
32. A film as a rapid sequence of still images, many stills create motion, many presents create the passage of time.
33. The hagfish, with a skull but lacking a true vertebrae, are still classified within the subphylum of vertebrates, Vertebrata. They join the lampreys—who do have vertebrates—in the jawless fish group, with speculation that they’ve lost their vertebrae over time.
34. Time passes more slowly for the one who keeps moving.
35. Instead of giving love room to expand, we box it in with our expectations. We need to give our love room to grow.
36. Participants accompanied by a friend estimated a hill to be less steep when compared to participants who were alone.
37. "Welcome the spring, the summer rain / We are ever new, we are ever new" from Beverly Glenn-Copeland's "Ever New".
38. 沒有一棵樹一朵雲是不美麗的。所以人也應該這個樣子。
39. In quantum physics, the act of observing creates a disturbance, double-slit experiment.
40. A trail as an act of co-creating, every hiker adding meaning to the path.
41. Dirt as displaced soil.
42. Dividing by zero being problematic, because as we divide ever-smaller numbers, the answer seems to approach infinity. If allowed, it would create fallacies where 1 divided by 0 or 2 divided by 0 would result in the same "infinity" (not that infinity is a quantifiable value anyways), basically creating a scenario where by dividing by 0, any number can equal every other number. In a world where we divide by zero, everything is zero, everything is the same.
43. A whale fall, in death an ecosystem blooms.
44. "Not" by Big Thief, to define by negation, the sun is too bright to stare at, the heat is felt, the shadow creates the shape.